[Opinion] Revolving Doors

An advertisement titled the “Revolving Door” appeared on TV on October 5 in 1988 when the presidential campaign between Republican George H.W. Bush (the current U.S. president’s father), then vice president, and Democrat Michael Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, was in full swing. The ad shows inmates going in and out of prison by means of a revolving door and a narrator saying, “Dukakis granted first-grade murderers leave as governor, and it was found that criminals used the leave of absence as an opportunity to commit more crimes, including kidnapping and rape.” The TV commercial concluded with this narrative: “Dukakis now says that he wants to do for America what he`s done for Massachusetts.”

It was a serious negative campaign. After the election, CBS and the New York Times conducted a survey in order to analyze the effect of presidential advertisements. Merely 23 percent of the voters believed that Republican candidate Bush would take tough measures against criminal acts before the “revolving door” advertisement was aired. However, after the advertisement was broadcast, the percentage of the people who thought Bush would take a tough approach against crime soared to 61 percent. Dukakis’s camp blamed this on the revolving door advertisement, but it was already too late.

A revolving door, originally a term used in criminology, refers to recidivism, but is now often used in the media as well. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) used a revolving door prison analogy in its report titled, “Attack on the press, 2006.” This means that the government repeatedly imprisons and releases journalists who criticize the government and puts journalists in prison in a “revolving-door style,” oppressing the press. The CPJ pointed to Iran as a typical example where similar oppression of the press occurs.

In addition, the CPJ said that “democratators” such as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez, elected in a vote, are suppressing the press under the disguise of democracy. Going between democracy and dictatorship as easily as going though revolving door is certainly a revolving door-style handling of the press. President Roh’s government might fall into this category as it is repressing the press more skillfully than before under the pretext of democracy’s virtue of “participation.”

Kim Chang-hyeok, Editorial Writer, chang@donga.com