GIA’s Policy Promotion Assessment Revealed

The Government Information Agency (GIA)’s principles and criteria for assessing each government ministry’s performance on policy promotion were made public for the first time.

On Wednesday, Rep. Lee Nak-yon of the Democratic Party disclosed the “2006 GIA Evaluation Principles and Criteria for Classification on Policy Promotion.” According to the report, under the category “Adequacy in Responding and Embracing Reports on Public Affairs,” there is the sub-category “Responsiveness to News,” which assesses how quickly ministries respond to the media. Five additional points are given if a response is made within 24 hours after a media report and zero points after 72 hours.

Under “Responsiveness to News,” there is also the sub-category entitled “Outcomes of Legal Responses,” which gives points in proportion to the number of claims filed with the Press Arbitration Commission and legal action taken against media reports, as well as to the number of correction notices or counter media reports. In addition, the “Direct Response” category gives three additional points to each correction notice or counter media report, two points to each article contributed to a newspaper and one point for a high degree of contribution.

Under “Performance Regarding Cooperation and Promotion in Affiliated Public Corporations,” there is “Performance of Policy Promotion” category, which assesses affiliated bodies’ compliance with bans such as reading the early evening edition of morning papers and permitting reporters to enter their offices.

The “Policy Briefing” category (15 points) evaluates items, such as the increase of policy related articles posted on the policy briefing website (www.news.go.kr) compared to the previous year (2 points), the increase of page view (2 points) and how well blogs are created and maintained (4 points).

The “Policy Customer Relationship Management” category (11 points), which is related to a recent dispute over sending emails without permission, allocates two points to the percentage of policy promotion emails read by customers and how well policy promotion emails regarding state affairs, irrelevant to the work of each ministry, are distributed (1 point).

“Although some of the categories sound quite good, such as “Acceptable Articles,” the policy promotion evaluation method of the GIA causes each ministry to respond to media reports with unreasonable and unnecessary aggression,” Lee said.

mindy@donga.com