Blasphemy in the Temple: Thoughts on Ramstad, Kirk, and the Finance Ministry

I’m going to add just one small bit to the fracas between the Korean Finance Ministry and two reporters with whose work I’m familiar — Don Kirk and Evan Ramstad. As to the questions themselves, sometimes, the function of a good reporter is to challenge official groupthink and corruption, especially in a place where groupthink is as prevalent as it is in Korea. I do not think that a country that aspires to be a hub of international business can nonetheless exempt itself, for cultural reasons, from ethical standards that have gained international acceptance. One of these is that governments ought not to ply interest groups or investors with prostitutes (which seems to be a reasonably good guess as to where the questions might be headed). If a reporter has a basis to believe that this has occurred, it seems fair to ask about it. The questions Kirk and Ramstad were at least as appropriate as the question that brought us this infamous episode of presidential mendacity. As for the context in which the questions were asked or the other issues between Ramstad and the Foreign Ministry, I have no particular knowledge and therefore nothing useful to add.

I will confess, however, that I am biased toward Kirk and Ramstad, am a fan of their work, and wish them both well. Long before this episode, I’d noted their role in a trend toward much-improved reporting about Korea lately. Some full disclosure would be appropriate: I consider Kirk a personal friend, and he arranged for his publisher to send me a free review copy of his excellent book about Kim Dae Jung. I don’t think this was enough to buy me off, but I put that out there for your consideration. Kirk’s book, like his original exposure of the 2000 summit scandal, are prime examples of questions that some Koreans no doubt considered pushy and inappropriate at the time, not just in spite of the fact that they contradicted Korean groupthink about DJ and North Korea, but because they contradicted it. Those who lived in Korea in those years know the extent to which those issues had become intertwined with Korea’s national pride and nationalism. For a time, it was blasphemy to challenge it.

Ramstad has featured my work, and Curtis’s, in the Journal. In addition to our lengthy conversation during which which he interviewed for that article, we’ve had a number of e-mail exchanges. These, in addition to my observation of his work, have been sufficient for me to get a sense of his subject matter knowledge, which is first-rate. His reporting has added a much-needed correction to past reporting of North Korea by reporting on conditions inside North Korea itself. Both Kirk and Ramstad are correspondents of the first caliber. To the extent that their questions drew attention to elephants that went unmentioned in a room filled with reporters, so much the better.