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E. Tammy Kim on South Korea’s ‘Mess of a Coup’

The world could easily have seen something ‘extremely frightening.’

December 6, 2024
Police officers guard the National Assembly as protesters against South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol gather outside to chant slogans in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Dec. 6, 2024. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)

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Before COVID, there was “CVID”: complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization. This was, loosely speaking, a long-standing principle of US policy toward North Korea that the Trump administration restated in the context of talks with the country in 2018; as E. Tammy Kim wrote for CJR that year, CVID, while a “catchy but unenforceable aim,” became the “demand du jour” in US media and eventually seeped into its South Korean counterpart, even if many residents of that country saw the talks differently. (“Ordinary South Koreans care more about peace than uranium counts,” Kim wrote, “but to a disquieting extent, their media outlets and politicians pay close attention to what Americans say.”) The US media focus on the North Korean side of the peninsula was unsurprising: stories about South Korea were “comparatively rare,” Kim wrote. When they did appear in US media, they tended to hew to what a journalist friend of Kim’s identified as a handful of common themes: “chaebol conglomerates, K-pop, kimchi, dog meat, and the aging society.” 

This week, though, a South Korea story that had nothing to do with any of these things—nor, indeed, its northern neighbor—broke through in a big way, not only in the US media, but internationally: late on Tuesday night, Yoon Suk Yeol, the country’s hard-line right-wing president, went on television and declared martial law. Quickly, protesters and journalists swarmed outside the National Assembly in Seoul; inside, lawmakers, some of whom reportedly had to climb through windows to get in, voted unanimously to reverse Yoon’s declaration. “It’s a nation that is stunned,” Mike Valerio, a CNN correspondent, said on air. “As more and more details were trickling out, people—including myself—were looking at their phones and we thought, wait, is this a typo? South Korea?”

Kim covered the chaos for The New Yorker, but not from the ground: she had spent much of November in the country—reporting, for example, on “4B,” a South Korean feminist movement that has gained traction in the US since the reelection of Donald Trump (as we also reported recently in this newsletter)—but flew out on Monday, a feat, she wrote, of “bad journalistic timing.” When we spoke yesterday, Kim told me that it was “terrible, terrible luck” that she had missed the declaration of martial law, but that there was no way of foreseeing it; South Korean politics was in a turbulent moment, and Yoon was increasingly unpopular, but his declaration was “incredibly unexpected.” As Kim sees it, the story cut through to such an extent in foreign media because “the language of martial law, and what that means…is something that’s both exotic, in a sense, but also familiar to anyone who has any familiarity with Cold War happenings.” (Also helpful: the drama unfolded late in South Korea, coinciding with many journalists and news consumers logging on for the day in the US.) Watching the coverage unfold, Kim was generally impressed; the New York Times, for instance, started a live blog, drawing on its strong staffing in South Korea, including reporters, Kim said, who are “completely bilingual and bicultural, which is pretty extraordinary in the history of foreign correspondence.” Since she wrote about US coverage of the Koreas in 2018, she added, there has also been an increase in South Korean titles publishing in English.

This has all happened despite an increasingly tough climate for press freedom in the country. (In 2018, Reporters Without Borders ranked it forty-third, out of a hundred and eighty countries worldwide, on its closely followed press freedom index; as of this year, it had slid to sixty-second.) This is the continuation of a longer-term trend: as Kim reported separately for us in 2019, South Korea’s ranking had been even lower under Park Geun-hye, an eventually impeached conservative predecessor to Yoon whose administration “aggressively censored and harassed reporters”; things generally improved under Moon Jae-in, a liberal successor to Park, but his administration would push a number of bills aimed at curbing so-called “fake news,” including one specifically targeted at the media industry that elicited alarm from journalists and rights groups. (That bill was dropped in 2021.) At the time, Yoon’s right-wing party called the bill “dictatorial”; when he came to power in 2022, he “seemed open to the press,” according to the Times, “going as far as fielding questions from reporters in the morning as he arrived for work.” But that didn’t last: he and his allies have since bashed journalists rhetorically and targeted them with lawsuits and even, in several cases, invasive investigations. “What was the reason for coming into my home where my family lives, humiliating me by digging through my underwear drawer?” a journalist with the public broadcaster said after a police raid last year. “The only explanation I can think of for why I was raided is that the administration is trying to scare us into submission.”

Which brings us back to this week’s declaration of martial law, which theoretically put the news media under military censorship. In the end, though, this was not enforced, and key communications networks stayed online; rather than being cowed, the Times noted, South Korean news organizations aggressively covered the unfolding chaos, while condemning it editorially. Amid the public pressure, and following lawmakers’ binding vote against him, Yoon rescinded his declaration, and his days could be numbered; earlier today, the head of his party expressed support for his impeachment, while the country’s military said it would reject any future declarations of martial law. Ultimately, South Korea’s democracy proved resilient—not least its vibrant media. “It was remarkable, the extent to which nobody cared that parts of the martial law declaration were specifically targeting the press,” Kim told me yesterday. 

That press will continue to face challenges, however, and not just from politicians; as is the case elsewhere, trust in the media is in decline while alternative sources of news—and, importantly, disinformation—are on the rise, especially on YouTube, as Kim wrote for us in 2019. When I wrote above that this week’s events had nothing to do with North Korea, this isn’t strictly true: in part, Yoon justified his declaration by gesturing at supposed pro–North Korean sympathies within the opposition. This reflected something that Kim wrote for us in 2019: that the “most resilient genre of disinformation” in South Korea is the “North Korean conspiracy theory.” (In that piece, she explored how a somewhat innocuous Bloomberg headline—apparently written by an editor in the US—that referred to then-president Moon as the “top spokesman” for North Korea blew up into a huge talking point on the political right.) Yoon subsequently entered office promising a much tougher line on North Korea. He, “maybe even more than his recent conservative predecessors, has made the North Korea boogeyman a core tenet” of his politics, Kim told me.

Kim noted in 2019 that a central manifestation of the North Korean conspiracy theory—one that was then having a moment politically—related to a 1980 massacre of pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju; the military carried out the massacre under direct government orders (and with the knowledge of the US), but the perpetrators and elements on the political right have since sought to deflect blame onto North Korea. Writing for The New Yorker this week, Kim noted that the images from Seoul recalled Gwangju, which was the previous time a leader had instituted martial law. This time, there was no massacre. But Kim noted to me that there could easily have been; watching a livestream, she was worried that all it might take would be for one soldier to get angry. If things had played out only slightly differently, the world might have seen something “extremely frightening,” Kim said. “This was kind of a mess of a coup,” she added. It could have been more competent. Either way, “bravo to people on the ground who were saying, We’re not going to do this. This is not Korea of 1980.

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  • And for Sports Illustrated, Chris Mannix profiled Adrian Wojnarowski, the star NBA reporter who stunned the world of sports journalism earlier this year when he stepped away from ESPN to manage the men’s basketball program at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure in New York. “There was no conspiracy,” Mannix writes; Wojnarowski was simply burned out and had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which didn’t force him out, but did “bring some clarity.” His prognosis is good.

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.