The publisher of title fired its chief editorial writer and a managing editor on the day the second caricature appeared online.
. . .
The new managing editor Sah Dong-seok said that his paper did not want to insult Russia, reports Marker website. “Besides, the caricature was done by freelancers and placed in the Opinion column,” he said. “I did not know that this picture could hurt your feelings so much.
There's a short write-up in the Times on April 1st, referenced in that first excerpt:
The Korea Times appointed Lee Chang-sup, 52, as the chief editorial writer of the nation's oldest English newspaper, Thursday. Sah Dong-seok, 53, was named the paper's managing editor.
Lee, who joined the paper in 1984 as a trainee reporter, served as finance and business editors and executive managing editor. Sah served as political and business editors, new media department chief and deputy managing editor after joining the daily in 1984.
Assistant managing editor Lee Kap-soo, 56, was appointed as chief of the newspaper's advertising department.
Little mention has been made in the local Korean media, save for one of the editors mentioning a "reshuffling" in a column this week. It remains to be seen what, if any, connection the "reshuffling" has to the cartoons. It's also worth mentioning that the cartoonist in question had some published on the website on the 6th, 5th, 4th, and 2nd, all coming after the editors were supposedly fired over them.
As I said in the first post, there hasn't yet been any objective news articles on the subject, and the source is two Russian news sites that don't seem much step above the paper they're slamming. The story will be more credible once other outlets, including the Times' competitors, report it. For now, kushibo has some interesting thougths on his Monster Island post:
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.
He has also exchanged emails with the cartoonist.
3 comments:
Don't put too much stock in the dates - the K-Times may have bought his work a week in advance, or his next 5 cartoons they could use.
Funny how the focus has changed since I first heard about this last night.
I mentioned in your other post that Monsieur Peray has sent me a second email, telling me "nobody was fired at the Korea Times."
I've worked in two large corporations in Korea, and lateral moves to entire different departments were common. The reshuffling could be a complete coincidence.
English-language newspaper staff were (and still are?) hired as English speakers with journalism background, not journalists with an English-speaking background, so it would be perfectly normal for the higher-ups to expect them to bloom wherever they're planted, so to speak.
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