Korea's representative public broadcasting system, KBS has been embroiled in a fairness controversy at every regime change with no exceptions. This is because the governance and organizational culture of KBS are vulnerable to political pressure. Nonet...
Korea's representative public broadcasting system, KBS has been embroiled in a fairness controversy at every regime change with no exceptions. This is because the governance and organizational culture of KBS are vulnerable to political pressure. Nonetheless, existing studies about the factors that hurt the fairness of KBS news have remained at a superficial phenomenon analysis. Therefore, this study aimed to reveal the structural factors that damage the fairness of KBS news from the perspective of press control mechanism, strengthened again by Myung Bak Lee regime. Case study, literature search, and in-depth interviews were used as study methods.
The study first analyzed through what means the political power and capital as well as the internal bureaucratized organization control KBS news. Through these analyses, this study tried to reveal how external control due to the political power and capital as well as internal control within KBS hurt the fairness of its news.
As a result, the analysis showed that the political power including the Blue House apply official control through the governance of KBS, meanwhile using authoritarianism to unofficially control KBS news. The political power also used not only traditional personal connection, such as regionalism, school relations, and kinship, but also work ties made mainly in news beat to influence KBS news. Politicians had a symbiotically back-scratching relationship with journalists rather than a conflicting one, and they achieved superior status through acting as patrons of journalists, then used them to exert a influence on KBS news. In this process, journalist's power-oriented arrivism caused them to give easily into temptation of political power.
Capital had secretive influence on KBS news through a patron's role including special treats, hospitality, supporting overseas training, and provision of accommodations for the journalists. Moreover, capital transmuted official relationship between the businessman and the journalist into private relationship by using regionalism, school relations, and kinship to control KBS news. In this process, the private relationship between the businessman and the journalist formed through the medium of traditional personal connection had the tendency to expand and strengthen to a back-scratching relationship between patron and client through the medium of personalistic clientelism.
Internal control of KBS was fulfilled based on a bureaucratized organizational culture. In this process, power-related special employment in previous authoritarian regime days weakened the horizontal solidarity between the employees, leading to a promotion of bureaucratization. The management and the executives of news and sports division of KBS used the authority over personnel affairs as a means of controlling them, which has absolute influence on arrangement of reporters' department and news beat, promotion, assignment to position, selection of correspondent and overseas training, etc. Along with reinstatement of the bureau-department system, hierarchical control which emphasizes the order of ranks became strengthened as well. Accordingly, the fairness was seriously threatened as specific view on news gathering and production of journalists had been forced
Due to strengthening of internal control of KBS, internalization that journalists assimilate to the mislead group logic was proceeding at a serious level. This internalized group logic brought about ‘exclusive grouping' of specific core departments and self-censorship of the journalists. Strengthening of internal control of KBS pulled back professionalism to give rise to increasing of formal objective reporting instead of shrinking accusatory investigative reporting.
The results of this study show that in order to improves the fairness of KBS news, its governance should be first reformed to become independent of political power. Not only that, the results confirm that KBS itself needs to innovate the bureaucratized organizational culture and to recover vocational ethics of the journalists.