135 Years of Covering Korea

Don Kirk, the Christian Science Monitor’s Korea Correspondent, has joined up the Choe Sang-Hun for a journalistic perspective on Korea that stretches across more than a century. If I were going to be in Seoul, I would definitely not miss this, and I’m looking forward to seeing the published product. Thanks to Don Kirk for sending:

Covering Korea: Then and Now
KOREA WITNESS: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm

Contacts:
Publisher, EunHaeng NaMu, Seoul:
82-2-3143-0651-3

The Editors:
Don Kirk, Seoul: 82-18-343-8289
Choe Sang Hun: 82-18-585-1828

Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club:
82-2-734-3272

In KOREA WITNESS, foreign correspondents remember the land of the morning calm — and their work.
The first American newspaper article about Korea more than a century ago reported the exhibition of a “mermaid” caught off the coast of “Corea.” When sailors found it, the account said, the creature was holding a mirror in one hand and a fine-tooth comb in the other, letting out “wild but not unfamiliar cries.”

Since that time of myth and wild imagination, parades of foreign correspondents have passed through Korea, trying to understand a country known as the “land of the morning calm” but also inhabited by rambunctious people with a tragic and often violent history. It was a daunting task a century ago, as it is today. For example, Jack London, the famed author of such American classics as “The Call of the Wild” and “White Fang,” struggled with a horse with the “most beautiful eyes” that turned out to be “stone blind.”

But still it was foreign correspondents who first reported the Koreans’ legendary “March 1” anti-Japanese uprising in 1919 to the outside word. They labored in sweltering heat and icy cold of the Korean War and gave the world the searing accounts of refugees killed by friendly fire, helpless people massacred by warring armies and soldiers crying over their fallen comrades. While the domestic media remained gagged by the military regime, foreign correspondents entered the rebellious city of Kwangju in 1980 and reported the bloodshed perpetrated by army troops there, providing the world with some of the best-known iconic images of the South Korean people’s twisted journey toward democracy.

Who were these foreign correspondents? What did they think of their work and the country and its people they were assigned to cover? How has South Korea changed and evolved in the eyes of foreign corespondents over the decades?

In 455 pages, KOREA WITNESS: 135 YEARS OF WAR, CRISIS AND NEWS IN THE LAND OF THE MORNING CALM — provides episodic answers to these questions.

The Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club arranged for publication of the book, which brings together contributions by 60 correspondents, retired and practicing, on coverage of Korea by foreign media. The publisher, EunHaeng NaMu, printed the book for release at the 50th anniversary of the SFCC on June 2, 2006.

The book, the first of its kind, arranges the contributions in a roughly chronological order. It was in 1871 that the first foreign journalist ever to report from Korea arrived with American forces for what some accounts at that time called “the Corean War” — the battles between American and Korean forces on Kangwha Island. The journalist was a photographer named Felice Beato, nationality unknown, who came over from Japan. His photographs are featured in the book’s opening chapter on the early history of Korea as reported in foreign publications.

KOREA WITNESS also includes gripping accounts of correspondents covering the Korean War, including Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune, Louis Heren of The Times of London, Bill Shinn of the Associated Press and Frank Gibney of Time, all of whom have passed away. John Rich of NBC, living in retirement in Maine, dictated notes on his Korean War experiences, and author Robert Elegant, with the International News Service during the war, later a best-selling novelist, also dictated notes as well as an excerpt from his new novel, “Cry Peace.”

KOREA WITNESS also features fresh revelations of the trials and tribulations of correspondents during the rule of Park Chung Hee, eye-witness descriptions from covering the Kwangju revolt and analysis of efforts at reporting from North Korea.

Contributors include retired authors and journalists recalling critical periods — Don Oberdorfer of The Washington Post, Richard Halloran of The New York Times, Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times, Bradley Martin of the Baltimore Sun, Norm Thorpe and Joe Manguno of the Asian Wall Street Journal, Mike Tharpe of U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal, Norm Pearlstine of the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.

Korean contributors working for foreign news agencies include K.C. Hwang and Paul Shin, formerly of the Associated Press, Shim Jae Hoon, retired from the Far Eastern Economic Review, and Kim Myong Sik, formerly Reuters, now with the Korea Herald. Chi Jong Nam, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, Lee Su Wan of Reuters, B.J. Lee of Newsweek, and Sohn Jie-Ae of CNN also contributed.

The editors, Donald Kirk, formerly International Herald Tribune, USA Today and Chicago Tribune, and Choe Sang Hun, International Herald Tribune, also wrote for the book — Choe on the story behind his Pulitzer prize-winning coverage while he was with the Associated Press of the No Gun Ri massacre during the Korean War. Kirk, a long-time correspondent who first landed in Korea in 1972, reminisced on his years reporting from Korea, including his expose in the IHT in 2001 of huge funds paid by the South Korean government to expedite the June 2000 inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.

The book is dedicated to the 23 foreign journalists killed during the Korean War. Among these are five Chinese journalists, all with Xinhua, the New China News Agency, whose names are listed for the first time among members of the media who died in the war.