The media in Ghana and South Korea: Similarities and differences
South Korea is, by all measures, a media-rich country and its press is a vibrant and powerful entity.
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This country of over 47 million people benefits from the availability of a highly literate audience. The adult literacy rate is estimated at over 97 per cent and since literacy is not a national concern anymore, the Ministry of Education has stopped estimating it.
The media in Ghana and South Korea share similarities and differences.
Like the media in Ghana, the Korea media set the pace of news and national agenda using particularly the dailies and the television network whose power of impact keeps increasing. Like in Ghana, the circulation of the national dailies is truly nationwide but unlike Ghana some of the big dailies run locally-based printing facilities to serve the readers in the provincial areas more efficiently.
Circulation
The current challenge of dwindling circulation affecting most newspapers in the world, is also prevalent in both Ghana and South Korea.
According to the Deputy Chief Editor of the Seoul Daily News, Mr Do Woon Lee, the paper's circulation, which used to be over one million a day, continues to decrease and the current circulation had decreased by about one-third, as compared to the situation that prevailed 20 years ago.
Speaking to this reporter during her visit to the offices of the organisation as part of an individual schedule planned for a group of 22 journalists who visited Korea for the 2014 Korea Foundation Invitation Programme for International Journalists recently, Mr Do said the Seoul Daily was established 110 years ago and had performed creditably over the years as the oldest state-owned newspaper in Korea.
Feedback
Mr Do said the paper — that published more stories on business, focusing on information technology, Internet game and information on industries — received about 200,000 feedback items from its readers on a single publication. The Ghanaian media also receive feedback through letters to the Editor, rejoinders, press conference and releases.
He encouraged media organisations to do more through innovation and creativity to be able to overcome the current global challenges confronting these organisations, stressing that newspaper organisations, such as the Seoul Daily News, were money-making organisations, and they have to do more to get more.
The President, Publisher and the Chief Executive Officer of the Seoul Daily News, Mr Lee Chol-hwi, said the media had a key role to play in promoting democracy, and and that his organisation had performed that function creditably over the years.
This function is also a huge feature of the media in Ghana where the media demand accountability from political leadership and offer the platform for the public and political parties to comment on political issues and get their activities published.
Yonhap News Agency
The Yonhap News Agency operates like the Ghana News Agency. Designated as South Korea's key news agency under a special law passed in 2003, all news in South Korea goes to Yonhap News Agency, which is the largest news-gathering network in South Korea, providing some 3,000 news items each day to local readers, through to domestic newspapers, broadcasters and online media, and to governmental bodies and companies.
Yonhap’s service is critical to the smaller media entities in provincial areas that can't afford their own correspondents in other places within the country.
During a visit to the news agency, its Managing Editor, Mr Yun, Dong-Young, said the organisation had 800 staff members, with 600 as journalists, comprising 40 correspondents abroad, reporting from 39 major cities in America, Asia, Europe, Middle East and Africa.
He said the agency played a crucial role in the 1998 Seoul Olympic Games, the 2002 World Cup hosted jointly by Korea and Japan and the 2010 G20 Summit, by feeding its subscribers with text, video and photographic accounts of these events in different languages, including, English, Chinese, Japanese and French.
Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation
Earlier, the group visited the Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), a public broadcasting organisation, established in 1961.
With 98 per cent of nation-wide coverage, the MBC is aiming to become a global multimedia group to meet the expectation of its audience and to remain as the most sought-after TV and radio station among both domestic and overseas audience and viewers.
The Corporate Policy Public Relations and Deputy Director of International Relations of the MBC, Jean Hur, said the goal of the MBC was to introduce the country’s culture to different audiences around the world through cultural exchange programmes. The Ghana Broadcasting Corporation has national coverage for GTV and its radio outlets.
Press Arbitration Commission
The participants also visited the offices of the Press Arbitration Commission of Korea which operates like the National Media Commission (NMC) in Ghana.
The commission was established in 1981 by the country's Basic Press Law for the resolution of disputes caused by press reports through conciliation or arbitration. Like the NMC which was established by an Act of Parliament, stipulated by a Constitutional provision, the legal status of the Press Arbitration Commission was enhanced by Article seven of the country's Act on Press Arbitration and Remedies etc.
The Damage Caused by Press Reports was enacted in January 2005, enforced in July the same year and revised in February, 2009.
The commission is composed of 40 to 90 arbitration commissioners, including one chairman who represents and controls the Commission, and two vice chairmen.
Each arbitral tribunal has five arbitration commissioners, including a judge in active service, a lawyer, a former journalist with more than 10 years of experience, a distinguished person in the press community.
The Director of Education and Team/Lawyer of the commission, Mr Yang Jae Kyu, who gave a lecture on the press dispute resolution system in Korea, said the number of conciliation cases handled by the commission increased from 423 in 1993 to over 2400 last year, with the number of arbitration cases also increasing from seven in 2006 to 190 last year.