Conspiracy Theory Time!
2013-01-04 01:51 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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omonatheydid
Could the government be behind the recent K-Pop scandals?
I came across an interesting post tonight that netizens are saying might explain the sudden boom in entertainment scandals as a cover up.
On January 1st, the Korean government passed a new law that grants any member of congress a pension of $1,200 a month from age 65 to death, and this includes any person that was a member of congress even for one day. There are currently 1,141 serving members of which 780 are eligible and the government has set aside \12.876 billion won for this purpose.
Not only is the law itself problematic and full of loopholes that can be abused, but it also comes just after both parties in the election promised that they would be giving up unnecessary political perks. Other areas of needed funding not receiving the bare minimum needed (orphanages were granted $1.50 - a 10 cent raise - a meal per child) are also being ignored in favor of this law.
A petition has been started with over 13,000 signatures and there are several articles detailing the online anger/outrage as well as a movement to bring the issue onto search rankings and Nate rankings but it's still outnumbered by the other scandals going on (the issue managed to jump 513 rankings up to 2nd since the movement started).
Source: NetizenBuzz
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Date: 2013-01-04 07:19 am (UTC)And wow, so many scandals that conspiracy theories come out. Not surprised to be honest though. Seriously, the last three days were more interesting than all of 2012
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Date: 2013-01-04 08:28 am (UTC)it really feels that way to me, too....
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Date: 2013-01-04 09:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-04 07:23 am (UTC)how do they know it's not just because all these celebrities didn't care about being caught cause they thought the world was gonna end back in december? it makes about as much sense...
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Date: 2013-01-04 07:35 am (UTC)"Some netizens are arguing that the timing is a bit fishy; the story of the shocking divorce was released only an hour after news claiming that current Korean president Lee Myung Bak had involvement in stock market manipulation, subsequently drawing the media’s attention away from allegations against the president. This has lead some netizens to think that the government released the news on Seo and Lee in order to protect the president from the Korean public’s interest in the allegations."
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Date: 2013-01-04 07:40 am (UTC)Idt they're referring to Block B's current problem in here though, its more like the celebs that were caught doing something bad, i.e dating, etc.
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Date: 2013-01-04 07:43 am (UTC)there's no lj user "City_Hunter"... it might be time for one... someone to partner with
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Date: 2013-01-04 10:26 am (UTC)lawd it's been a troubling night
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Date: 2013-01-04 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-04 07:57 am (UTC)Political Organizations + Media always come hand in hand. They are the same thing now anyway.
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Date: 2013-01-04 08:41 am (UTC)I don't think the political organizations directly had a hand in releasing all this flood of scandals as of late, but it's been a known secret that a lot of portal sites like Daum, Naver, and Nate have been taken over by the government long ago. Hot topic keywords are changed within minutes; random news articles suddenly dominate over the political ones. It's even worse with television; 100% of KBS and 70% of MBC is owned by the government and there have been new tv channels owned by the three big newspaper companies, all very pro-government.
This isn't just government-media issue either; Internet news in Korea is incredibly easy to manipulate and the journalists, especially in the entertainment sections, aren't your average Anderson Cooper, neither well qualified nor determined enough to make the truth known. Some advertisements for nugu groups or a new drama show up as the top most read article in the middle of the day; it's gotten to a point where "media play" is an actual term, because it's an obvious truth that companies pay these portal sites to put their articles on top.
Same goes with these comments from the Netizens, which many of the international fans think is the general public opinion. Do you honestly read Yahoo! news comments on Obama and think that all Americans must think he's a communist? No!
I've seen sites where people post links of news articles and encourage people to make comments of certain political nature (Ilbe was caught doing this numerous times); there are fans and antis everywhere, waiting for some articles about a celebrity to pop up and defend/attack him. NETIZENS ARE NOT THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
Overall, I would just like to say that as incredulous as this possibility of government playing up scandals sounds to many people who's had the privilege of freedom of press, censorship is not that farfetched of an idea to many others.
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Date: 2013-01-04 09:15 am (UTC)Overall, I would just like to say that as incredulous as this possibility of government playing up scandals sounds to many people who's had the privilege of freedom of press, censorship is not that farfetched of an idea to many others.
Well said. I think what a lot of people first think of, when they read articles like this one, is that these articles mean to indicate that these scandals were actually created by the government to draw attention from other issues, which isn't exactly correct. While there probably have been scandals in the past that were purely fictional creations made for the specific purpose of drawing attention away, most of the time these scandals are in fact real to some extent and all the government had to do was to work with the media heads to manipulate front pages, search engine rankings, etc. at a convenient time to push the article into the public eye, and to make an issue appear much more scandalous than it may actually be.
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Date: 2013-01-04 09:35 am (UTC)with the conservative party in power, i don't think this is a stretch
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Date: 2013-01-05 02:22 am (UTC)i second that. i hope people stop judging public opinions purely based on netizens' comments. it's getting annoying tbh.
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Date: 2013-01-04 09:08 am (UTC)I can see it for the other scandals, esp if couples have been dating for a month ("Go, minions! Find me some delicious celebrity couples that I can out!") but Block B's seems to have been in the works for a while.
If not then can we expect January to be like a scandal-advent calender? Every day the media sources open another window to another scandal to munch on.
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Date: 2013-01-04 11:19 am (UTC)1. Finland (-10)
1. Norway (-10)
3. Estonia (-9)
3. Netherlands (-9)
...
22. Japan (-1)
...
44. South Korea (12.67)
...
47. USA (14)
"Unlike indexes from previous years, the 2011–2012 index allowed for negative scores and has a wider overall spread of scores (-10 to 142 compared to 0 to 115.5 in previous years)." wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index)
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Date: 2013-01-04 11:37 am (UTC)as much as i don't like all these conspiracy theories...this one here seems much more likely to me since the government still has a huge influence on media companies. and since korea seems so dependent on their naver search results, it's kinda obvious they only pay attention to the most searched scandals instead of educating themselves about what is going on in their country. this also happens here but the ~idol-industry~ isn't as strong anymore so as to cover up huge political scandals.
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Date: 2013-01-04 02:55 pm (UTC)the rumor was about a senior in the industry who srewed up big time and who wanted his dirt to be covered by some rookie group.
But now they toally can be the target of politics.
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Date: 2013-01-04 11:58 am (UTC)It wouldn't be surprising if the government really did expose scandals on purpose.
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Date: 2013-01-04 07:41 pm (UTC)I was confused because I thought it would be smarter to just give the money to orphanages for food instead of a campaign but the problem is so much bigger than just funding for orphans. It's about corruption within the South Korean government and how they only care to increase their own paychecks but can turn a blind eye to the basic needs of the most vulnerable and needy in society.
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