It is only natural for the press to be in a strained relationship with politicians, but this tension is valuable, productive, and constructive if the press sticks to being the press and the politicians stick to being the politicians. When the press sticks to maintaining proper integrity, its mission becomes to monitor and challenge politics and the politicians, based on fair standards that serve the public interest. The press should not allow itself to let other motives cause it to deal with politics, or with any politicians in a way that deviates from its proper role.
What the politicians have to do in this relationship is keep from pulling fast ones on the press for their advantage, keep from defining it as the enemy and trying to eliminate it, and not turn it into a target of any kind for the sake of bettering their chances. Any politician who, based on this virtue, believes he or she is the victim of any fault of the press that might damage its role in monitoring the politicians, that individual should be able to issue just rebuttals or protest.
The Chosun Ilbo has struggled on its own initiative to follow this "righteous way" of journalism. Meanwhile we go about producing our pages, always agonizing about why it is that we are not recognized as being the absolute best. This moves us to work that much harder to improve ourselves, and we believe that we are indeed moving in the direction of a higher standard for what we do.
At the same time, we have never felt so strongly about how the work done by politicians must also be the subject of their own self-reflection and work for improvement. Though clearly not an issue of our suggestion, the Chosun Ilbo has become the target of hate for allegedly being the origin of the whole situation. It makes us keenly aware of how some politicians need to return to the "righteous way" as well.
The age in which we live will no longer permit politicians to embrace a given medium as if it were their "comrade," nor should they turn any news organization into the "enemy" either, or to use the press for their own means. If the politicians create their own factional disputes only to attack certain media organizations for allegedly fabricating the situation, when all they have done is given balanced coverage of the situation, then all the press can do is remind itself of how it must respond by doing a better job at what it is supposed to do in the relationship with politics.
The Chosun Ilbo resolutely declares that it will not yield or be shaken by politicians who do not walk the "righteous way." As we approach the presidential election, we again declare to the politicians and to the world that we have an ample supply of our own antibodies to keep us from deviating from the righteous way and earning criticism that we might be "a newspaper that ostracizes" a given politician, or "a newspaper that takes sides" with another. We wish to state that we will be working for a wholesome and honorable relationship of tension by doing our job while the politicians do theirs. Final judgment is the role of the people.
(April 10, 2002)
See our list of related articles titled
"Press Under Siege."
