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Media and Civil Society 155

for the newly established Mir Foundation. Again the administration struck back,
smearing the paper by charging that its chief correspondent had received free trips
courtesy of the Daewoo shipping chaebol .
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A few months later, however, one of Choi’s personal assistants, Ko Young-tae,
began leaking video footage of Choi’s undue influence over the president to Chosun
Ilbo ’s affiliate, TV Chosun. Perhaps intimidated by pressure over the Daewoo revela-
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tions, the station suppressed the information for over a year. Meanwhile, the opposi-
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tion Justice Party began raising questions about $71.8 million in chaebol donations to
Mir and another foundation, K-Sports, both believed to be controlled by Choi.
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Then on October 24, 2016, a rival cable channel, JTBC, aired a blockbuster story
about a tablet allegedly owned by Choi showing that she had edited at least forty-
four of the president’s speeches. Within a day, TV Chosun began releasing Ko’s vid-
eos, which showed Choi’s autocratic manner of ordering presidential aides about—an
indication of her extraordinary authority. In the media free-for-all that followed,
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news outlets released a growing body of evidence of the corrupt relationship between
the chaebol and Choi’s foundations, Mir and K-Sports.
Investigations also produced evidence that the Park government was engaging
in practices that threatened a return to the country’s authoritarian past. One probe
turned up a 2015 “black list” of more than nine thousand names, targeting promi-
nent filmmakers, actors, artists, and writers in ways that a special prosecutor found
“seriously undermined the freedom of thought and expression.” Aides to President
Park, including a former culture minister, engaged in systematic harassment of any
prominent critic, “reviving a practice of past military dictators, like her father, Park
Chung-hee.”
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Public reaction to the emerging revelations was unprecedented. The largest mass
demonstrations in the country’s history filled Seoul’s streets, while chaebol execu-
tives began appearing before parliament to confess their “donations” to the Mir and
K-Sports foundations, which many believed were fronts for the president. Empowered
by this potent combination of media-driven scandal and popular protest, in December
2016, South Korea’s three opposition parties pushed through a motion that led the
parliament to impeach the president and send her case to the country’s constitutional
court, forcing her to step aside.
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In a country where, as one journalist put it, political scandals “are a dime a dozen,”
and “most people tune out the news,” observers began asking how this scandal could
snowball so quickly. A commonly cited factor was the realization, as one citizen said,
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that the president, “who we thought was . . . a mentally stable person, has been rely-
ing on a damn shaman cult her whole life.” Many were also troubled by the discovery
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that someone with no official position could be acting, behind the scenes, as the most
powerful person in the country. There was a palpable “sense of betrayal” for Koreans
who had seen Park as “a corruption-free version of her father.”
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All these factors seemed at first to center on Park. If the scandal had played out
like those in the past, her impeachment and removal from office in March 2017 would
have satisfied the crowds, and she would have joined a procession of presidents dis-
graced at the ends of their terms, allowing politics to continue as usual. But ongoing
revelations instead drew scrutiny to broader issues, particularly the pay-to-play rela-
tionships that had developed between the government and the chaebol . When inves-
tigation into Choi family privilege revealed that special admission had been granted
to Choi’s daughter by an otherwise highly competitive elite university, the anger was
visceral.
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