iPhone 4S "fast losing luster"?

"Oppa, I'm a big Apple fan, but please stop taking pictures of me with that
not wholly new, uncompetitive, losing luster iPhone 4S. Shirǒ!"

Various people in the K-blogopshere have noted that the Korea Times seems to have it in for Apple's iPhone, leading some to even suggest that they might be on the take from Samsung, Apple's home-grown rival (note, however, that the iPhone is full of Samsung innards).

This KT article on the release of the iPhone 4S seems to fit that mold. While I can see a number of reasons not to buy the iPhone 4S (I have an iPhone 4 purchased in June 2010 and I had passed on the iPhone 3Gs a year earlier), the article seems to overstate the case a bit. This sentence in particular stands out as sounding contrived:

"I dropped my plan to buy the iPhone 4S. It’s not wholly-new and also there are big problems relating to hardware-related issues. I am a big Apple fan. But I’m very disappointed by the uncompetitive iPhone 4S," said Park Yeon-gee, a 31-year-old office worker in Seoul, who’s been using the iPhone 4.

This is an all-too-common technique used by Korean reporters (though I know from first-hand experience that American reporters are guilty of it as well): massaging an actual quote to fit the reporter's narrative, or removing it from its original context. Although it's possible Ms Park referred to the iPhone as "not wholly new" (an unfair criticism, methinks), I have doubts that she referred to it as "the uncompetitive iPhone 4S."

And how would this "big Apple fan" know about the "big problems" relating to hardware-related issues (that's a lot of relating) if she actually hadn't bought one?

Ultimately, unless I see similar "losing luster" articles on Samsung, or see a more balanced one about Apple, I'm going to have to go with my running theory that the Korea Times is in Samsung's pocket. You can't spell on the take without KT.

...

Luring Lee and Ling

From the Chosun Ilbo we get news that a recently executed spy chief was the one responsible for luring Current TV reporting team Laura Ling, Euna Lee, and Mitch Koss into North Korea where they were captured, sentenced to a dozen years of hard labor, but later released when former President Bill Clinton flew into Pyongyang for an angry photo op.

From the Chosun Ilbo:

Recently executed North Korean spy chief Ryu Kyong planned and orchestrated the abduction of two female U.S. journalists on March 17, 2009, it emerged on Sunday.

Ryu, who served as the deputy director of North Korea's State Security Department, obtained intelligence that Laura Ling and Euna Lee, journalists working for Current TV, were planning to visit the North Korean border as part of their report on defectors.

He then used his overseas operatives to bribe an ethnic Korean guide in China to lead the two women into the hands of their abductors. The guide took Ling and Lee to a point on the banks of the Duman (or Tumen) River, where they were dragged across the border into North Korea.

If you have read what my contrarian opinions on the then-ongoing Ling and Lee saga (here, here, here, here, and here), you will not be surprised that my response to this is, "Horsesh¡t."

We'll start with the obvious and then go to the glaring: Other than "it emerged Sunday" in the first paragraph, we are left with zero information about who said this. From where or whom did it "emerge"? When it comes to journalism, subject-less passive voice is weasel words.

And then there is the glaring problem that this take simply does not jibe with the facts we know now. Way back, when Laura Ling and Euna Lee were captured and Mitch Koss just barely escaped, everybody (well, except me) was under the impression that they had been plucked from the Chinese side while merely taking video of the North Korean side of the border. But as it turned out, Laura and Euna did in fact venture onto North Korean soil "very, very briefly." It was then that the North Korean soldiers tried to capture them, but Laura Ling said in her book they managed to get across the river and back to the Chinese side before being dragged back into North Korea.

So which is it? The third paragraph above completely omits Ms Ling and Ms Lee voluntary entering North Korean territory. It's almost as if the source from which this report "emerged" is unaware that Ms Ling and Ms Lee confessed to going into North Korean territory of their own accord.

And this is problematic. In fact, if it jibes with anything, it's the pattern of behavior coming from the Chosun Ilbo whereby speculation is being reported as fact.

At most, what might be at work here is that spy chief Mr Ryu might have maneuvered for the trio to be captured, but ultimately they sealed their own fate by venturing into the DPRK (though we know North Korea had kidnapped people from China and brought them into North Korea). Frankly, though, I don't buy it. If you read the early chapters of Laura Ling's book, the people who captured her and Euna Lee seem pretty clueless about who it was they captured. The early hours and days of their ordeal don't sound as if they would have gone down that way if it had been known before their capture who they were and where they would be.

I loathe the Pyongyang regime, but as I made clear before, these three demonstrated gross carelessness and negligence and their foolishness may have cost lives. I don't think it is right to point the finger at phantom others when we already know who was responsible for them being right where they were.

Moreover, I don't like the mainstream South Korean media (and the Japanese and Western media who pick up their reports) giving us a distorted picture of what's going on up in the North by their supposition-filled reporting. From the ascension of Kim Jong-il to the conditions on the ground for the peasantry up there, we are doing everyone a gross disservice by engaging in a journalistic circle jerk of speculation parading as objective news.

UPDATE:
This might not be his intended takeaway message, but Joshua at One Free Korea notes that "the Chosun Ilbo doesn’t offer one scintilla of detail on its source for the story or why we should consider it credible."

At ROK Drop, GI Korea also describes his reservations about the whole thing.

Disturbing video snuck out of North Korea

Frequent One Free Korea commenter and occasional Monster Island visitor Theresa sent me a link to this The Shanghaiist post which contained the following video (put together by the guerrilla journalists at Rimjin-gang) snuck out of North Korea:



Seeing the emaciated and dazed twenty-three-year-old woman is just heart-wrenching. But the pugnacious youngish ajumma in the next scene gives hope that there are more like her who are willing to stand up to authority (and that there are authorities like the guy in the picture who don't automatically fight back when challenged).

I direct you to One Free Korea, where Joshua also put up a post on this video, with some very good commentary. A sample:

These are the expendable people of North Korea, the ones who don’t have a place in the propaganda parades, the ones who don’t get to eat the food aid that the regime either refuses or steals from them. I’d be surprised if that woman were still alive today.

One day, these people are going to hold their oppressors accountable. The more I see, the more convinced I become that we should teach them how, and then arm them. North Korea needs a revolution, and no peaceful revolution can possibly succeed in such a place. When governments become destroyers of humanity, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them. I see no other way.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if that were sooner rather than later?

Peray says "nobody was fired at the Korea Times"

In relation to this post and this post on the controversy surrounding Russian complaints about the syndicated political cartoons that appear in the Korea Times, Monsieur Stephane Peray (the cartoonist in question) wrote a second email to me:

By the way Kushido , if you want to have a scoop and be the first blog to give reliable informations – here’s one : NOBODY was fired at the Korea Times – this information was written in Russian papers without any check and blogs in SK have relayed the information. Of course if someone has to be fired – I should be the one ( I even offer to give my demission instead of apologizing ), nobody has to lose his job because of my cartoons but me – I wouldn’t accept that . But they are still publishing my cartoons.

Thank you for the update, sir.

We're still wondering if there was a shake-up (a lot of anglophones in Korea aren't fond of the quality of journalism at the KT), but any shake-up would not necessarily have anything to do with the cartoons.

The devil's advocate fears Pravda (Or, Why the Korea Times's Thailand-based French cartoonist, who should have been fired long ago, should not be fired now)

I'm no fan of the work of Korea Times's Monsieur Stephane Peray, an internationally syndicated political cartoonist who is based in Thailand. In fact, I've been critical of his work a number of times (e.g., "Oh, dear God" and "Exhibit 62 why you shouldn't choose your cartoonist through contests involving submissions of box tops from Froot Loops packages"), and I mockingly commended him for pushing the envelope by inadvertently getting the Korea Times to print the P-word, a no-no even in places less conservative than Korea.

Here's what I wrote last year:

Sometimes you look at a cartoon and you have to look long and hard to figure it out, because it’s so subtle or its meaning so complex.

But the KT guy’s cartoons seem the opposite. Looking at them to discern their message reminds me of my nephew coming back from preschool and showing me his fingerpainting. As he says, “Look! Look!” I am in a panic because I can’t figure it out and I don’t want to upset him… I scan for clues, but what looks like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon turns out to actually be, according to my nephew, a dinosaur devouring a cow.

In other words, our (the Korea Times readership) inability to “get” his cartoons may not suggest anything bad about us. Rather, it may mean that the cartoons themselves are simply lame, stupid, childish, and/or just plain unfunny. In some ways this lack of talent by someone in a rarefied journalistic position who is held onto despite such universal opposition is so… well… Sheltonesque.

I have long thought the guy's work did not belong in the KT, and now I may have gotten my wish. According to Pravda, the KT has fired Monsieur Peray. This is being talked about at Chosun Bimbo, Brian's site, and The Marmot's Hole (the latter has a long list of links to past K-blog complaints about Monsieur Peray).

Apparently the straw that broke the camel's back was this one:

But the thing is, I didn't really get my wish. My hope was that the KT would wake up and realize that Monsieur Peray's presentation was often too lame or too opaque for the audience to get it, much less be challenged by it or gain an appreciation of his style, but instead he got canned for pissing off the Russians. Got that? He got kicked to the curb because he offended Moscow.

Am I the only one who finds that the least bit disturbing?

As I wrote at Korean Rum Diary, my interpretation of the above cartoon is that the bear represents Russian imperialism, not merely Russia, and the ongoing separatist battles inside the Caucasus are a direct result of that imperialism, so this seems to be suggesting that the Russian bear is crying over something that is — to some degree — of its own making.

Now, if I'm right, is that not a legitimate point to be making in a political cartoon? Let me make clear that I'm playing devil's advocate, but it admittedly is not very hard. In the Caucasus, tens of thousands of Chechen civilians have died — estimates of 25,000 to 50,000, including the "disappeared." In some Battlestar Galactica-type world, some do see such terror as perhaps the only means to get an imperial power to back the fu¢k off. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and all that.

I'm not of that belief, but in such a world, is it not reasonable to point out that the terror inflicted on the Russian bear's cave is a direct result of prior actions of the Russian bear?

Okay, I can play double-devil here and point out that Monsieur Peray's depiction of the dead is crude and disrespectful, in the above cartoon and in others, such as the one below (about the execution of the Bali bombers):

Could the above cartoon have had the same message but without the strewn body parts? Perhaps, but maybe he felt it was important to depict the carnage created by these terrorists to show what they were doing in the name of their brand of Islam. I don't know; I'm not in his head.

Indeed, maybe that's Monsieur Peray's problem: we're not in his head. I sometimes think I see what he's getting at with some of his more controversial cartoons (like the one above), but I'm never entirely sure, and I've even written to him in the past for clarification. I asked him about the Australian cartoon dealing with the bush fires:

Can you explain the point of cartoon with the heads on fire in Australia? Your message seems a tad muddled and I didn't really get it.

And he replied:

Yep apparently some readers didn't get it too and think it is insensitive. I tried to point out the fact that Global Warming is most certainly the cause behind those heat waves so the fire on the little people is symbolizing human madness and greed and consumption that created this Global Warming. Nothing to do with the poor victims of the fire (but some people tend to look a cartoon on the first degree...

Nothing to do with the poor victims of the fire... who burned to death. Okay, like I said, the guy is somewhat misunderstood, but it's largely his own fault for drawing sensitive subjects in a crude and and gory way. Anyway, if an emailed explanation is the only way to really get it, then something is clearly wrong.

But...

How this has gone down is all wrong. If the guy's unfunny, then fine, go make a complaint (as many did). If the guy's presentation is too opaque, childish, or "out there" for people to get it, then fine, go make a complaint (as many did). But if you're complaining you don't like the message — and he does take some harsh digs at the US and apparently the Russians for imperialism and war-mongering, not to mention his dislike of neo-Nazis — then this is where some red flags pop up with me.

Again, to recap, this guy was apparently canned because he offended the Russians. The Russians whose pendulum has swung away from the precipice of democratic rule, back toward the loving embrace of totalitarianism. Hey, if that's the way the Russian people want to live, I can't do much to stop them, but when they start wielding that hammer against a newspaper in my 'hood, I take issue. This is almost — though not quite — as troubling to me as Chinese students waving their flags downtown and assaulting those exercising the right in South Korea to free speech.

Indeed, I am a bit alarmed that so many in the K-blogosphere are celebrating this move. Is free speech valued only when it's our own or something we agree with?

In some ways, this reminds me of the controversy over the Dutch cartoons depicting Mohammed. On the one hand, I am appalled that anyone would kill or plot to kill someone over such things. But on the other hand, I always found the justification for printing them in the first place to have been rather bogus: What it boiled down to was deliberately offending hundreds of millions of people — and I'm talking about the vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims who did not engage in any violence over the cartoons — just for the sake of offending them. It was childish eye-poking gussied up as an exercise in free speech.

Anyway, I have trouble reconciling a reaction against Muslims offended by the Dutch cartoons with a movement to remove Monsieur Peray as the KT cartoonist. Not that I know of anyone who takes both positions (but I suspect there are some). For all his offensiveness, Monsieur Peray has been making valid points, regardless of how controversial they are.

And isn't that what political cartoonists are supposed to do?

So again, (and just so we're clear, this is my thesis) he should have been discontinued for doing his job badly, not for doing it controversially. This is not a cause for celebration.

But what do you expect? The controversy over Monsieur Peray gets into all kinds of silliness. Not just a few people have bashed his cartoons as a sign of Korean insensitivity, even to the point of calling for boycotts of Korean products (not French, not Thai, but Korean). But Monsieur Peray is not Korean nor is he in Korea. So should the KT be responsible for an internationally syndicated political cartoonist offending people, which is what even good political cartoonists do?

Many writers, like Korean Rum Diary, nevertheless consider the KT directly responsible responsible, since they reprint his stuff. Frankly, though, I don't see it that way. As I wrote at KRD:

Respectfully, I don't think they printed it because it's anti-Russian. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the editor might not even perceive it as anti-Russian at all.

I think it was printed because Monsieur Peray is their syndicated cartoonist, and he's almost certainly their syndicated cartoonist because they have a facile notion that international = globalized = better quality.

All of Monsieur Peray's cartoons appeared in the KT, apparently. Were they to have refused to print some of them on occasion out for fear of offending, I'd be a bit troubled by that.

But maybe that makes me an outlier.

I'm also a bit annoyed by the notion that "Koreans" (as in a monolithic, singular entity) can dish it out but not take it. From KRD:

Yesterday a South Korean oil tanker (with Filipino and Korean crew) was hi-jacked by pirates. Could you imagine the uproar if an internationally known newspaper ran a cartoon mocking the South Korean Navy in light of both this and the Cheonan sinking?

I seriously think Koreans would burn down the embassy of the country whose paper printed that cartoon.

Hmm... For eleven years, one of the most popular television shows in America was a comedy about a war in which perhaps a million Koreans were killed. Sure, many Korean-Americans and other Asian-Americans protested M*A*S*H and how it depicted Koreans and Asians, but in South Korea there were no embassy burnings during the eleven-year run of that show and its laugh track.

Anyway, I don't have high hopes for them finding a good replacement. I’ve been a newspaper cartoonist in college and I can tell you — from my own experience and from watching others — that it’s easy to run out of “funny” ideas very quickly. There are a lot of one-trick ponies in the comics, which is why I stopped reading the funnies. And when someone is bereft of clever or funny ideas, the results can be very weird if not downright disturbing. Offending for offense’s sake can easily become the preferred path, and we might end up with someone just as "edgy" or worse. (If they're going to go with a syndicated cartoonist, might I suggest Tom Tomorrow, even though it's heavily America-oriented?)

Sigh. Oh, and if you're wondering why I don't comment at Hub of Sparkle anymore, despite all the links here to past comments, it's because I was banned from there a year ago.

Free speech, yay!

UPDATE:
Monsieur Peray has responded to my email, which I made into its own post.

UPDATE 2:
Monsieur Peray has written me a second email, telling me "nobody was fired at the Korea Times."

LAT on the sucky world of being a reporter in Korea

The system is broken, and newbies learn to be cogs in that dysfunctional system. From the Los Angeles Times:

The young college graduate acknowledges that she has a job with pretty demanding hours -- like 3:30 a.m. to 3:30 a.m.

Sometimes, to get any shut-eye at all, she shares a bed with a bunch of other trainees. Then there's the minder who rules her every moment, even in the shower, not to mention the marathon drinking sessions to get her in fighting shape.

At 23, she's a cub reporter slogging her way through a grueling round-the-clock journalism training program that often plays out more like a college fraternity hazing. It's a sink-or-swim test of willpower and stamina designed to prepare young wire service, newspaper and television writers for survival in South Korea's no-holds-barred news culture.

"I think the toughest part is not being able to sleep," said the woman, running to another late afternoon court hearing at an hour when most workers were heading home. "That affects a lot of other things. Most nights, I feel lucky if I can sneak in three hours."

The decades-old program is loosely organized among a handful of news outlets in Seoul. Not every news company participates, but those that do send all new hires -- an annual total of 100 to 200 cubs -- to spend as long as six months proving their mettle.

They are assigned to various police stations where they eat, sleep and bang out their stories on crime, courts and hospitals on laptop computers.

Just like so many other industries in Korea, this one requires camel-going-through-the-eye-of-a-needle effort to get in, and this fosters a sense of entitlement among some of those who succeed. It also can lead to resentment against those who did not get there based on their own hard work, wits, sweat, and sleep deprivation (e.g., privileged kids or Westerners, depending on the industry).

If you ever have a legal or criminal matter that brings you to a police station, you might find these cubs or their barely senior seniors. Sometimes they unscrupulously feign being police officers and get you to reveal information. Other times, though, they can be sympathetic people who can help you avoid trouble.