Publisher's Note
Fake news and information are following one after another regarding President Yoon Suk-yeol’s recent visits to the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. The spread of such news and information has been led by left-wingers’ terrestrial broadcasting programs.
It is MBC that spread the most serious fake news. On Sept. 21, the president attended the seventh replenishment conference of the Geneva-based Global Fund in New York and left the venue while talking privately with his aides. Most of the conversation was hardly audible, and yet MBC displayed captions after jumping to an arbitrary interpretation. The broadcasting station reported that the president insulted U.S. President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress. Moreover, the station sent an email containing its captions to the White House. Just after the broadcasting, the opposition Democratic Party of Korea pushed the South Korean president hard, saying that he caused a ‘diplomatic catastrophe.’ Along with that, the opposition party passed a resolution of dismissing the foreign affairs minister by the power of the majority in the National Assembly, but the President rejected the proposition.
Sound specialists say there is an effect that unclear utterances can be heard better when the captions are displayed in the video or TV. They explain this is because the letters fill the insufficient vocal information, in the process of which, however, distortions or biases can be generated. Although President Yoon’s conversation was hardly audible, the information exposed first by MBC’s arbitrarily-interpreted captions was stuck to listeners’ brain and became a yardstick of judgment. Following MBC, many other broadcasters and newspapers also spread the distorted captions without any fact check, leading to the public’s misrecognition of the reality.
The opposition party has been demanding President’s apology for the utterances, even if U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris diminished the distorted information by calling ‘disinformation’ when she met President Yoon in South Korea on September 29.
A wrong recognition is hardly changeable once fixed. In South Korea, left-wing activists and news outlets have already spread a lot of fake news with regard to ‘U.S. beef import and BSE fuss,’ ‘Sewol ferry disaster,’ ‘the naval patrol Cheonan sinking,’ and so on. In particular, the BSE uproar in relation to U.S. beef import was initiated by MBC. The outlets and the Democratic Party of Korea constituted and supported by the leftist activists are still distorting the reality with unproven facts and false information.
By distorting the situation intentionally, the opposition party backed by MBC is trying to lead rallies of hurting the President finally to call for his impeachment. Former President Park Geun-hye had to step down about five years ago after surrendering to candlelight vigils instigated by fake news, and exactly the same situation is repeating itself now. Even if the ruling party has already entered a legal action against MBC, the President and the ruling party still need to keep taking uncompromising stance on the opposition party’s political maneuvers and attacks.