Naneun Ggomsuda

» see ddanzi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Naneun Ggomsuda started on 27 April 2011 as a podcast from Ddanzi Ilbo, the satirical internet paper Kim Ou-joon had been running since the late nineties. The English press mostly rendered the title as I'm a Weasel. Four men sat down with microphones and spent each episode on the administration of President Lee Myung-bak, in a register closer to a bar argument than to a broadcast.

It got enormous. By the Korea Herald's accounting it averaged around two million downloads per episode and at one point stood as the most popular podcast on iTunes, which for a Korean-language show about Korean domestic politics is a number that still looks like a typo. Six million people had downloaded it inside the first seven months.

The reason it worked is not complicated. Korean broadcast news in those years was careful about the presidency in a way the show simply refused to be, and the audience that wanted the uncareful version had nowhere else to get it. A podcast needed no license and no advertiser, so the only real constraint left was the law.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the price of the format ~

That constraint arrived. Chung Bong-ju, one of the four and a former National Assembly member, was convicted of spreading false information over claims he had made about Lee Myung-bak's involvement in the BBK stock manipulation case. He was sentenced to a year and he served it, which meant the show carried on through 2012 with one of its hosts in prison and the prison sentence itself as recurring material.

This is the part that travels. I could not follow a word of it without translation and I have no standing on Korean politics at all, but the mechanism is legible from a long way off: a format cheap enough that nobody can switch it off, carrying the thing the licensed channels were declining to carry, until the state finds a different lever. Twenty months is not very long. It was long enough to put a man in a cell.

~ the last episode ~

The final episode went out on 18 December 2012. The presidential election was the following day. The hosts spent it doing what they had done for twenty months, going after the Saenuri Party and its candidate Park Geun-hye, and they closed by telling the audience to go and vote. "For the future, and more importantly, for yourselves, please vote."

Park Geun-hye won. The show had been built end to end around an election and it stopped the moment the election was decided.

~ what came after ~

Kim Ou-joon did not stop. He went on to Papa Is and then to the daily News Factory, and he is a considerably bigger figure in Korean media now than he was in 2011. The media scholar Lee Gi-hyung described what the show had offered as a catharsis, a sense of connection for people who had been handed no other way to express it.

Park Geun-hye was impeached and removed from office in 2017. Nobody restarted the show for it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »