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Some 700,000 tourists visit the Reichstag in Berlin every year. The building was severely damaged during World War II, but after German reunification, it was rebuilt and a glass dome added that now allows visitors to see into every nook and corner of the parliamentary building. A Reichstag official says it symbolizes the idea of letting the public observe how parliamentarians work from above and transparently.
The government is supposed to serve the people who elect it, but it is necessary to monitor and check whether it does anything that runs counter to the national interest to serve its own. The best way would be to allow everyone to watch government activities through a glass dome, but since that is practically impossible, the role of monitoring has devolved on the press. That is why the press is called the "fourth estate."
In an exclusive headline story on the front page on May 7, the Chosun Ilbo reported, "A meeting of ministerial-level officials from the foreign, security, and finance ministries discussed on May 3 ways of letting the state-run Export-Import Bank handle North Korea¡¯s illegal funds of $25 million in the Banco Delta Asia." The government had kept this meeting under wraps. But once it was reported, it admitted that it did take place. It backpedaled saying it was merely ¡°reviewing the possibility¡± in case U.S. financial institutions decline to transfer the money.
It would be in the interest of the Roh Moo-hyun administration, which has pledged to keep the Sunshine Policy alive, to help transfer North Korea's illegal funds. But it would be against the national interest, considering that the South Korean government's image might be tarnished by what could be seen as support in laundering North Korea's ill-gotten gains and by any damage to the credibility of the Exim Bank. The information was leaked to the Chosun Ilbo by a government official in the know, who had been agonizing over it for a couple of days. He finally told this newspaper, which he trusted. If the Roh administration had by then already shut down all the press rooms, as it plans to do, and made it practically impossible for journalists to access officials, there would have been no story, and the government could have gone ahead and hurt the national interest with impunity.
The Watergate scandal was a watershed in U.S. political history. After U.S. President Richard Nixon stepped down over the scandal in 1974, American politics became significantly more transparent. The scandal was leaked by a whistleblower known as "Deep Throat" to the Washington Post. If Nixon had adopted a Roh-style gag rule that bans journalists from unauthorized meetings with government officials, he might have held on to the presidency and moored American democracy in the pre-Watergate era for a considerable time.
Kim Sa-seung, a mass communications professor at Soongsil University, says, "The centralized e-briefing system pushed by the Roh Moo-hyun administration would expose everything including when and where journalists and their sources meet and what kind of information they exchange. Under this system, only information that is palatable to the government would be disclosed. It would be impossible for problems within the government to be exposed to the outside."
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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