JoongAng reporters enjoying US beef
A photo showing Korean restaurant patrons enjoying US beef that appeared recently in the JoongAng Daily, one of Korea’s big three conservative media outlets, turns out to be completely staged. The two women in the photo, it turns out, are reporters for JoongAng.
Hoping to do a story on Korean’s enthusiasm for US beef, they showed up at a local eatery but couldn’t get folks in the restaurant to go on record for them. Instead, they sat down and posed for the camera themselves. An apology from JoonAng is reportedly forthcoming.
Interestingly, I couldn’t find anything in English on this story. Wonder why. Still, it’s more grist for the mill in a country where media integrity is seriously in question.
Another story in yesterday’s JoonAng reports another (yes, another) protest, this time in support of Korean broadcasting giant MBC’s show PD Diary. The protesters were there to defend the show against government plans to investigate whether the show’s producers knowingly distorted the facts regarding the safety of US beef.
So, you’ve got the whole country split down the middle on pretty much everything, with the media actively engaged in deepening the divide!
Filed under: Politics, media | Tagged: beef, food, Korea, media, Politics
hey, if it’s good for ratings, right?
Seriously though I am glad that this fraud has been exposed. David and I have recently been discussing the media’s role in forming public opinion. Ideally the media would be unbiased and dispassionately report the truth. Unfortunately the truth is not always in the media’s best interest.
in the end this crisis like all others will pass… the pendulum of life always swings from one extreme to the other but spends most of its time in the (calm) middle. Well atleast until we run out of oil….
You know, that’s the thing. In Korea (like most places) it seems like the truth is highly subjective. The problem is when there isn’t even lip-service paid to being objectionable. The liberal media is extremely so, and same goes for the conservative press.
For me the news is a valuable source of information about the place I’m living in. And as I read it I notice how it starts to skew my observations, so they tilt one way or another. Their biases start to sink in, until you look around and realize their coming from a very narrow point of view.
[...] JoonAng Daily fakes photo [...]
[...] to the recent anti-US beef protests that nearly shut down the country and were fueled by a flood of mis-information over the saftey of US [...]