The Pendulum Swings Back

On Sunday, the Chosun Ilbo marks its 86th anniversary with issue no. 26,498 since it embarked on the task of giving a voice to the people. It is impossible to sum up these 86 years of hardship and triumph side-by-side with the people in a few phrases. To start with, this is not an ordinary nation, given the depth of hardship it has overcome. The sorrows of a nation invaded, divided and torn asunder by war, enduring poverty, hunger, and the yoke of military dictatorships and internal division live on in every Korean. Some have asked what history intends for us by inflicting such suffering on the country. But it was a sense that there was a purpose to it all that sustained us through the difficult years.

We were not defeated. We bowed, but we did not break. Though we lay down, we stood up again. For it is not only in the depth of our suffering but also in our resourcefulness that we are unlike other nations. That, too, is the history of the Republic of Korea, dismiss it as a trifle though some people may.

We at the Chosun Ilbo are proud of that history and of the people of Korea. It is no blind pride that averts its eyes from the blood that has been spilled, but a sense of confidence in our nation's regenerative power and the strength with which we were able to rise again. The Chosun Ilbo itself owes its existence to these strengths, because it was founded in 1920 thanks to the limited freedom won by the March 1, 1919 Independence Movement, when the nation rose up in protest against Japanese militarist rule. Born of the nation’s struggle, its closure in 1940 was a last-ditch attempt by Japanese imperialism to save itself.

If the Chosun Ilbo calls itself a national daily, it is not from an arrogant sense that it has always led the nation but from a living recognition that its duty as a newspaper is to share the nation’s fate. In an editorial on May 1, 1920 titled, "On the Japanese Language for Education," the Chosun Ilbo pointed out, "Korean children copy only Japan's shortcomings because they are taught not in Korean but in the Japanese."

On Feb. 17, 1936, when Japanese oppression intensified, the Chosun Ilbo lashed out once again at attempts to suppress the native language. "No language is treated with more contempt in its own land than Korean. Children are banned from using the Korean at school and fined if they do so even outside school. What is so wrong with a nation using its own language that you prevent us from using this language with its long history?"

The literacy drive the Chosun Ilbo conducted from the late 1920s came from a keen recognition that the defeat of our nation was in no small measure due to the fact that 17 million out of its 20 million people were illiterate. The reason we recall these old episodes is not to claim that our history has been spotless, but because the forces are growing who would obliterate the Chosun Ilbo’s history altogether.

Our present-day concerns about press freedom stem from an attack of those in power and their fifth column in the disguise of civil activism, not just on the Chosun Ilbo but on the press itself, and with it on the free expression of public opinion. This attack from the powers that be is a new challenge, quite different in nature from the military governments’ suppression and seduction of the press. Today, the powerful and their sympathizers no longer merely try to suppress public opinion; they believe they can manufacture it.

That public and private broadcasters which ought to speak for the people become instead organs of government is nothing new; it was the military governments that arrogated to themselves the right to appoint the leaders of the former and nominate those of the latter. What is new is that the government itself, at Cheong Wa Dae, has set up a pseudo-media outlet that attacks newspapers critical of the government and eggs on others to mount an attack against the press by the press while gagging critical dailies with lawsuit after phoney lawsuit.

With a state-run consent-manufacturing plant as a front, power is trying to drive the privately run press out of town. The Confucian scholar Yulgok Yi Yi said 400 years ago, "Public opinion is what the people agree is right from the bottom of their hearts, untempered by interest or force." Our government refuses to listen. It spits on public opinion. And since those in power have turned their ear away from the voice of the people, those critical of the government have closed their hearts to its publicity machine.

As a result, information no longer flows from the people to the government and visa versa. There is a block in the channel that alienates power from the people, the people from the press and the press from the press, that disrupts mutual trust and makes them hostile to one another. “A country that gags its people is headed for ruin,” says Yi Yi.

We at the Chosun Ilbo believe that Korea cannot progress to the status of a developed nation unless it frees itself from the state of distrust those in power have created. No country in the world can develop without building trust among the people and between people, government and the press.

On its 86th anniversary, the Chosun Ilbo pledges itself to building trust brick by brick, day by day, in the hope that the centenary 14 years hence will find the Republic of Korea a prosperous, developed nation. If we have to be more humble, if we have to be more accurate, if we have to be fairer, we will exert ourselves more; if we have to embrace a wider audience, we will open our arms.

“Without trust, nothing will stand,” says the old tenet. That is true for politics, and that is true for the press.