Last September nearly 2,500 people filed a suit against MBC's PD Diary,
claiming that the distorted TV show caused candlelight protests and damaged the livelihoods of some citizens.
They were after a million won a piece. Yesterday the court threw out the case. From the Korea Herald:
A report aired by broadcaster MBC in April of last year suggested that those who consume U.S. beef could contract the human form of mad cow disease. Following the broadcast in a popular investigative news program "PD Notebook," tens of thousands of Koreans took to the streets to protest a Seoul-Washington agreement reopening the Korean market to U.S. beef.
In its verdict, the Seoul Southern District Court ruled that while the information in the program may not have been accurate, the producers could not be held accountable for the protests that ensued.
Lee Heon, a legal representative for the plaintiffs, said the group will appeal the ruling.
Story in Korean here, source of the above photo. In December some 1,000 Korean-Americans also joined up with lawyer Lee Heon and his group "Lawyers for Citizens," filing suit because the mass hysteria of Koreans on the streets caused them humiliation and ridicule overseas. Curious whether that suit will be thrown out, too, as the program was evidentally not responsible for the panic. I know I have yet to see a penny from the humiliation and ridicule I endured hearing about 크래이지 카우 and the nefarious plots of my government.
You stay classy KTU.
4 comments:
If it weren't for this economic clusterfuck, I'd suggest the Korean government start apologizing financially for the idiocy of its people... Maybe instead they could put IQ tests at ports and airports to stop the dumbness from spreading, or going back to 1980s style methods of crowd control when the idiots take to the streets...
You stay classy KTU.
I'm not sure I understand your sentiment here. And rather than go into several long paragraphs why I think what you might be thinking is a possible misinterpretation of what the cartoonist is thinking, I'll just wait for your response. :)
My interpretation was that each country had its own burden to bear, its own disaster to deal with: cyclone, earthquake, and in Korea's case the thread of Mad Cow Disease. I don't see the connection between disasters that killed tens of thousands of people and the imagined threat of a disease. Now, I know the union---from whence the cartoon comes---also had the imposition of imports in mind, that the LMB government was in their minds compromising Koreans' safety in order to smoothe things over with the US. But I found it a bad comparison.
Then my assumption about your interpretation was basically correct.
However, I think the cartoonist is mocking the people who have gone overboard and treated the supposed Mad Cow threat like it's a Biblical plague of the same order.
Maybe I'm being overly generous in my interpretation, but in my professional and academic interaction with individual members of the KTU, it has become clear to me that they are by no means of one mind on any issue, including this.
(In fact, a colleague of mine who is associated with the KTU seriously considered breaking up with her boyfriend because he — also a KTU associate — became obsessed with the Mad Cow Disease "threat.")
Thus I don't think it would be out of the ordinary for a cartoonist — even one in a KTU publication — to be mocking the overreaction which many Koreans bemoaned.
But, as with everything else, I could be entirely wrong. If it is as you interpreted, then I wholeheartedly agree that it is tacky and tasteless. Beef is not a "safe" food, but the threat from Mad Cow is not on the order of the earthquake in Sichuan or the cyclone in Burma.
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