[Editorial] Na Kyung-won case

Na Kyung-won of the Grand National Party lost to Park Won-soon in the Seoul mayoral by-election last October by a 7 percent margin. Most analysts agreed that an allegation that she spent 100 million won ($90,000) at a skincare clinic in Gangnam cost the ruling party candidate a lot of votes along with the disclosure that President Lee Myung-bak purchased a plot of land in Gangnam in his son’s name to build his retirement house.

In the contest against a rival posing as the advocate of common people, the claim of expensive beauty care was hugely damaging as it put Na into a super-privileged group detached far away from grassroots life. Everybody talked about it and few listened to the candidate’s explanation that she had visited the clinic about a dozen times chiefly for treatment of her Down syndrome-suffering daughter, paying less than 6 million won in total.

The Seoul Police, acting on Na’s complaint of libel filed against seven people, including some magazine reporters and an Internet podcast host, who spread the skincare claim, announced this week that their investigation reached the conclusion that Na’s assertion was correct. This was confirmed by treatment charts, bills and receipts and statements from doctors, who said the clinic’s highest membership fee was 30 million won a year.

The election was over three months ago and there is no way of reviewing the result except when the rival candidate or his registered campaigners are directly involved in false allegations. Na Kyung-won’s case once again proved the mighty effect of “negative campaigning” in elections, which has destroyed numerous candidates to date.

In the upcoming parliamentary elections and the presidential election later, parties and campaigners for individual candidates may be tempted to use the rumor-mongering tactics erroneously encouraged by what happened to Na in the mayoral vote in Seoul. The only way to prevent such attempts is to bring all negative campaigners mercilessly to justice before or after the vote, meting out the maximum penalty in the election law and the Criminal Code.

It is feared that the SNS communication will be increasingly used for the circulation of harmful information in future elections. If this is a realm that inevitably has to be left up to individual sense of ethics, the ever-expanding online media, including podcast shows, need to be sternly cautioned against reproducing groundless rumors and false allegations advertently or inadvertently. We will be closely watching how our law enforcement system will work particularly on the seven accused in the Na Kyung-won case.