TRISTEN TAYLOR: Media freedom is disappearing from democracy

Three metro stops from Seoul’s central train station, Yongjin Kim has carved an hour out of his packed schedule to meet Business Day. The former editor-in-chief and current CEO of South Korea’s prestigious investigative journalist outfit, Newstapa, is on trial for defamation, for daring to publish a damning interview three days before the 2022 general election. 

The interview between freelance investigative journalist Shin Hak-lim, and a key figure in a land development scandal, Kim Man-bae, revealed an explosive claim. Thirteen years ago, the current president and back then a prosecutor decided not to indict a man involved in the real estate and banking scandal. President Yoon Suk Yeol’s response? A bit more than denial. The police raided Newstapa’s office and Yongjin’s home. South Korea used to be Asia’s best media landscape, a beacon of liberty in a region noted by the absence of media freedom. 

“We’ve come to realise,” Yongjin said, “that our foundations for democracy are not yet that strong. We didn’t know that. After more than 30 years of practising and experiencing democracy since 1987, we never imagined that we would revert to dictatorship again.” 

There’s a kind of familiarity about South Korea’s history. From 1910 to 1945, the country was a Japanese colony. Like the Europeans in Africa, the Japanese embarked on a project to destroy South Korean culture and language, to create a tabula rasa upon which they could place their “superior” and “civilised” ways. Also like the Europeans, there’s a continuing steadfast refusal to apologise for past injustices. 

Then came the Cold War. Korea was carved into two in 1948, which led to a brutal war between 1950 to 1953. Stalin and Mao against the Americans. Park Chung-hee grasped power in a 1961 military coup. After the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency assassinated him in 1979, another dictatorship followed. A popular uprising in 1987 ushered in liberal democracy.

But corruption didn’t go away. Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, was elected president in 2012. Two years later, reporters revealed corruption and bribery. She was sentenced to 25 years but was later pardoned. So a little bit more than K-pop and kimchi.

South Korea is one of many democracies killing media freedom and the global assault is happening right now. The annual Ibrahim index of African governance has come out: media freedom rankings across the continent are in the red.

Tanzania’s communications regulator suspended Mwananchi Communications online licences in early October for 30 days because its “content has led to negative interpretations to the nation”. 

On October 18, news broke that the Mauritian government had been wiretapping journalists. Doubling down, President Pravind Jugnauth shut down social media on November 1, citing security concerns in the run-up to the general election. After civil society went berserk, he backed down a day later. Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora was, also on October 18, placed under house arrest after 800 days in jail — progress of a twisted sort.

The tattered remnants of US democracy hit another nadir last month. The owners of the LA Times (Patrick Soon-Shiong) and the Washington Post (Jeff Bezos) forced their editorial boards not to endorse a presidential candidate, the power of capital usurping liberty. 

Prefiguring the era of the cyber barons, Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote: “The wealthy, on their part, had no sooner begun to taste the pleasure of command ... thought of nothing but subduing and enslaving their neighbours; like ravenous wolves, which, having once tasted human flesh, despise every other food and thenceforth seek only men to devour.” 

So what’s going on with this widespread reversal of democracy? A situation where the Seoul city government can bring down TBS, a popular public broadcaster, for being critical. As Yongjin said: “It seems like it happened without us even realising it. In other words, we are realising that our structures, our systems, were actually weak.” 

A free media should be at the core of a democracy, part of the deep foundations. For without journalists reporting on what’s happening, holding those in power to account, the demos is blind. Voting, mass demonstrations and morally justified civil disobedience all require information. And that’s why media freedom is a special kind of right and one that is barely, if at all, considered in liberal democracies. 

The political philosophy of liberalism is concerned with negative rights, which are about the freedom from interference. Governments shouldn’t regulate religion or prevent us from speaking our minds. Quite wrongly, media freedom is seen as nothing more than this kind of right: for example, reporters shouldn’t be hounded by ridiculous libel laws, such as those in the UK, that allow the powerful to suppress the truth. 

Treating liberty of media as a negative right is insufficient because media freedom is about the common good; it is something that needs to be enabled, a positive right. Of course, a positive right focused upon the common good requires a definition of what the common good is. In this context, that is democracy itself. Our society made that choice in 1994 with the widespread agreement that apartheid should be replaced with democracy. Since media freedom is a fundamental part of democracy, to enable it is to enable democracy itself. 

What does that mean in practice? The shackles of capital and political oppression need to be cast aside. There’s only one way to do that, public funding for an independent media. And this must be embedded in the deep structure of democratic law, similar to the right to housing or clean water. 

Because the SA state isn’t banning papers and arresting journalists — we are not war-torn Burkina Faso, where annoying journalists are conscripted into the army — we believe our media is free. But that’s what Yongjin thought. The spectre of repression hovers. Like liberal democracies across the world, our democracy is weak. 

Scoundrels like Jeff Bezos and President Yoon Suk Yeol claim they are democrats but their actions say otherwise. Media freedom doesn’t mix with oligarchy and autocracy. The struggle of our age, liberation and a barefoot gravel road are ahead. 

• Taylor, a freelance journalist and photographer, is a research fellow in environmental ethics at Stellenbosch University.