Page 169 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

154 Chapter 8

and increasing opposition to perceived power grabs by the Islamist ruling party. In
response to rising public pressure, the Ennahda Party was forced to leave power, and
a caretaker government under the prime minister, Mehdi Jomaa, put the democratic
transition back on track by presiding over the drafting of a new constitution that the
US secretary of state, John Kerry, called a “model” for “the world.”
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The firestorm that this scandal ignited followed a familiar pattern: a journalist
airs documents obtained from a partisan-motivated source; through the dynamics of
intraelite and intermedia competition, the story grows into a scandal sparking pub-
lic outrage; and the denouement helps defend the country’s democratic revolution
from reversal, in this case, by aspiring Islamist authoritarianism. Without Riadhi,
observed journalism professor Thomas Bass, Tunisia’s transition “might have come
to a dead end.”
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While a freelance journalist used a blog to spark reform in Tunisia, in South Korea
the mainstream media—both television and the establishment newspapers—became
central to a concerted, collective effort in 2016 to address the nation’s deepening cor-
ruption. For nearly thirty years since the end of authoritarian rule in 1988, scandal had
already played a recurring role in disrupting collusion between the nation’s powerful
executive and equally powerful conglomerates, or chaebol . After liberation from the
Japanese in 1946, South Korea developed as a state with a close, even collusive, alli-
ance with the chaebol that would eventually control nearly 80 percent of the economy.
Subsequent public pressure for democratization took two forms: violent uprisings
against dictators in 1961 and 1987 and, since 1988, a combination of media-driven
scandal and mass mobilization to check the corruption of legally elected presidents.
Throughout the country’s more recent quarter century of electoral democracy, these
dynamics succeeded in periodically breaking up collusive pacts between the chaebol
and the executive, allowing South Korea to develop a deeply rooted mass aspiration
for greater political integrity.
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These trends culminated in the largest corruption scandal in the country’s his-
tory, which began in 2016 and followed, to a significant degree, the political pat-
terns seen in Indonesia and Tunisia. Given the structural collusion between the
country’s chief executive and the chaebol for nearly forty years, every South Korean
administration has taken office with an inclination toward deepening corruption
that, in retrospect, has only been checked by media exposé and mass protest. The
presidency of Park Geun-hye, the daughter of the country’s long-serving dictator,
General Park Chung-hee, was no exception. From the time she took office in Feb-
ruary 2013, her entourage set in motion a typically corrupt relationship with the
chaebol , extracting $70 million over the next three years in personal bribes and dona-
tions to two foundations controlled by the president’s “shaman” adviser, Choi Soon-
sil, who gained her exceptional influence by purporting to speak with the ghost of
the president’s murdered mother.
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For nearly three years, presidential power quashed repeated media attempts to
expose this increasingly sordid nexus of corruption. In 2014, the newspaper Segye Ilbo
reported on documents that implicated Choi’s family. But President Park turned on
the paper, interrogating its journalists, threatening affiliated companies with an audit,
and demanding the dismissal of its president. A police officer investigated as the
source of the leak committed suicide after leaving a note saying, “Listen journalists!
The people’s right to know is what you live and exist for. Please do your job.” A year
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later, the conservative journal of record, Chosun Ilbo , published an exposé charging the
senior presidential secretary with extracting “donations” from thirty conglomerates