Bradley K. Martin and Uwe Parpart
Journalists going after a story traditionally focus on answering the “five Ws” but that has often been difficult in South Korea.
That certainly was the case during a period of martial law in the 1970s and 1980s when the military-backed government had all the tools needed to intimidate Korean journalists. Government agents were known to spy on foreign journalists using wiretaps and even blackmailed some after catching them in honey traps baited with supplied sexual partners.
The country has become more transparent since becoming a democracy in 1987 and a sloppy attempt at a coup d’etat by President Yoon Suk Yeol failed before any censors in the coup plotters’ group could keep the world from learning the pretty fully available answers to four of the five W questions regarding the incident: the who, the what, the when and the where.
It looks like Yoon colluded with elements of the military by appointing General Park An-su, the Republic of Korea Army’s chief of staff, as martial law commander. But, in the National Assembly in Seoul on Tuesday (December 3), with soldiers in battle gear trying to get in and shut down the country’s parliament, Yoon’s own civilian party leader turned on the president.
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