Government Scales Back Measures against Media

Amid the growing protest by news reporters against the government’s “Advanced Press Measures,” the Korean Information Service (KIS) decided to revise a few clauses of the “Standard of the Support Towards Media Reporting.” The KIS said yesterday that it submitted the revisions to the Ministry of Legislation.

The KIS decided to change Clause 1 of Article 11, which has been considered harmful to reporters; “Writing media reports about government offices should be carried out after consulting with the PR department” was changed by putting “in principle” into the clause.

The KIS’s move is the third revision of the press guidelines so far, after changing a guideline to “the government can designate embargoes and can punish them,” and modifying the registration of journalists clause.

Many criticize that the measure itself was established in a haphazard manner as the KIS is scrambling to revise the clauses in question whenever the press takes issue with them.

Sohn Tae-gyu, professor of communications and journalism at Danguk University, said, “The government should not create laws and regulations that are designed to coordinate, control or manage the reporting activities of journalists. The thought of doing so should never even come up. Whenever there’s a problem, it tries to change it, but it’s now nothing but word play.”

Controversy seems to continue to swirl up even though the government is trying to lessen the effect of some of the more problematic clauses, as the government and the KIS seem determined to push ahead with the press measure.

leon@donga.com