[Editorial] Campaign against the media: control or reform?

Amid tax audits and a fair transaction probe by the National Tax Administration and the Fair Trade Commission, a weekly magazine disclosed a confidential document concerning the ruling camp`s alleged plan to control the news media. According to the document, the nation`s major newspapers were classified into three categories, anti-government, neutral and pro-government. In order to cope with anti-government media, the government was urged to set up a "torpedo net" and launch a frontal offensive against them. The ruling Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) raised suspicions of the document`s credibility, but if it is genuine, the attitude toward the press of President Kim Dae-Jung and the ruling MDP could justifiably be said to have reached a dangerous level.

It is regrettable that the self-proclaimed government of the people, which boasted that it would guarantee freedom of press more assuredly than any previous regime, was found to be author of a document that amounts to a declaration of war against the press. How did the ruling camp come to view the media as an enemy, even going so far as classify according to their perceived stance on the government?

It is to be noted that the documents were of three types, produced at different times, and that their contents are similar to a controversial document uncovered in 1999. That document, ostensibly a plan to control the mass media, was allegedly authored by allies of Lee Jong-Chan, former director general of the National Intelligence Service. Naturally, the similarity of the documents raised suspicions that the ruling camp has long been maneuvering to control or tame the press.

Above all else, we are concerned that the ongoing tax audits and fair transaction scrutiny may be connected to the ruling camp`s seeming plot to clamp down on defiant newspapers. The documents called for comprehensive reform of the government and the ruling party and the establishment of a fresh ruling hierarchy, and went on to advise them to adopt "normal and legitimate means" of manipulating the media. Since the inauguration of hardliner Kim Joong-Kwon as MDP chairman, the ruling camp has pursued harsher policies, as well as tax audits and business transaction probes of major media firms, in what appears to prove the validity of the documents.

Moreover, the documents, in order to restrain criticism of power elite, urged the ruling camp to make a social issue of the reform drive against the press, indicating that media reform was not the aim of the policy but rather a means of controlling them.

Since the documents were allegedly reported to President Kim, the ruling camp is obliged to reveal their source and provide an adequate accounting of the matter to the victimized mass media and the general public. There is no denying that the media`s role is to check and criticize the government. Identifying what is right and wrong is fundamental to democracy.

If the government regarded it as appropriate to clamp down on local media outlets because it was not prepared to let them do their jobs, then its behavior is tantamount to denying freedom of the press. Any attempt to regulate the media on the pretext of promoting reform is absolutely intolerable.