Rumors are a form of cowardice on the part of both their creators and disseminators. Rumors sometimes play a benign role in an oppressed society, as a form of whistle-blowing to expose facts that are detrimental to the authority of those in power. Luckily, we have passed that stage of societal development, yet there are still people, even in legitimate media circles, who like to play with rumors.
Rumors made a rousing comeback recently in two major newspapers, one in 
Korea and the other in Japan. As a result, the Park Geun-hye administration established a historical first by criminally indicting a foreign correspondent for defaming the head of state. The Seoul prosecution charged Katto Tatsuya of the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun last week with libel in connection with his article “President Park Geun-hye missing on the day of ferry sinking … Who was she meeting then?”
The story took much of its content from a column that appeared in the daily Chosun Ilbo a few weeks before that was largely based on rumors circulating in Seoul’s business circles. Katto’s Aug. 3 article and the July 18 column by Choe Bo-sik said virtually the same thing: President Park might have been having a tryst with a male companion on April 16, the day of the worst Korean maritime tragedy in living memory.
The 48-year-old Japanese journalist was questioned twice by the prosecution before his indictment without physical detention on Oct. 8. The Korean writer of the column “The rumors about the president” was not criminally charged but was summoned by prosecutors as a witness. He did not comply but released an “explanation” claiming that the Japanese article was different from his in that he did not mention a romantic relationship in the column, which he said was written to criticize the president’s secretive style of governance.
Prosecutors accused the Japanese reporter of publishing false information about President Park with malicious intent. The libel clause of the Law on Information and Communication Networks carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail or a 30 million won fine. Article 70 of the law stipulates that a libel case under this statute cannot be prosecuted against the express will of the victim. Thus we can conjecture that President Park gave her express or tacit consent to bring charges against the Japanese journalist, but not against the Korean writer.
The lengthy Sankei article, which was widely circulated here, extensively quoted the Chosun column in saying that President Park’s leadership was being seriously shaken as people suspect that she was away from the Blue House with a man, a close aide for decades, on the day the passenger ferry Sewol sank in the South Sea, causing seven hours of confusion during the rescue efforts.
Here we see a fascinating coordination between two major newspapers of Japan and Seoul to create a fiction about the activities of Korea’s head of state, liberally using groundless information collected from unofficial daily circulars from Korea’s Wall Street, the Yeouido stock exchanges. The piteous part of this affair is that both writers, having abandoned their fact-finding task and shamelessly resorted to sensationalism, now claim that they were working in the public interest.
Presidential aides, somewhat belatedly, confirmed that the president was inside the Blue House on the day in question until she left for a visit to the disaster control center at 5 p.m. on April 16. And Seoul prosecutors said Jeong Yun-hoe, the president’s alleged companion, had lunch with a “scholar” that day. Libel charges can be effectively contested in court with the claim of truthfulness and working in the public interest. Having the truth factor denied, the accused needs to stress public interest as the motivation for his article to avoid conviction. We’ll have to wait and see how he proves his cause.
After his indictment, Katto told his Japanese colleagues in Seoul that he had believed the Park-Jeong rendezvous rumor was “true” because Korea’s largest daily newspaper mentioned it under a well-known byline, even spelling out the name of the alleged partner. Choe, however, said that his reputation as a responsible journalist with a 27-year career was damaged by Katto’s quoting of his article for “low-grade” reportage.
The two writers are now pointing their fingers at each other, one trying to evade criminal responsibility and the other to escape from a controversy which he cannot deny having set the stage for. Here we are obliged to raise a serious question about the two reporters and all other members of the media community: How can we claim integrity and credibility as purveyors of legitimate journalism if we rely on stock market rumors in trying to promote justice in our society, let alone criticizing the highest office of the republic?
When we hear rumors from overseas that Barack Obama is a Muslim and the Japanese Emperor has a mistress, we laugh and frown. There were some worthwhile rumors like the one in the early 1990s that an ex-president had amassed 400 billion won in a slush fund, which led to the investigation of Roh Tae-woo. If we find traces of truth in any tip from a source, it is our mission as journalists to start digging into the dark world of conspiracies and collusion, instead of writing down, “Rumor has it that …”
Historians point out that many instances of rumors, misinformation and disinformation have turned the tide of history by manipulating and distorting public opinion and leaders’ decisions in old and modern times. The famous “Let them eat cake” remark attributed to Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution was later found to have been invented by rumormongers in Paris who used the “libel” pamphlets to attack the royalty. “Libel” was introduced into English to mean “the act of publishing a false statement that causes people to have a bad opinion of someone” (Merriam-Webster dictionary).
Nowadays, we live in a flood of latter-day libel in the form of SNS messages, Internet postings, numerous podcasts and, unfortunately, some of the prestigious “Ilbo” and “Shimbun” newspapers. The problem is that established journalists in the print and broadcast media who have to fight against those poisonous words are tempted to accept them as fodder for their professional work.
By Kim Myong-sik
Kim Myong-sik once worked as a correspondent in Seoul for Reuters. He served as the head of the Korea Overseas Information Service in the early 2000s. ― Ed.
