Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

We’ve all seen journalists’ stories about getting
stories — tales of facing down danger, of dealing with the
bureaucracy, battling censorship, all of that.

Foreign correspondents have written numerous books on their
adventures in pursuit of news. They have little to say,
though, about regurgitating material from “pool reports”
or churning out stuff for the others in the pool.

All of which brings us to the pool system as it exists in
Korea, that is, the pool system and its blood brother, the
press club system. Korean journalists often band together
covering politicians, ministries and agencies, guaranteeing
that each of them has more or less what the others have and
nobody gets into trouble. The clubs are quite exclusive. No
foreign journalists gain admittance.

It’s assumed the foreigners will form their own groups or
get special attention from media officials skilled in
dealing with the foreign media. The foreign, finance and
defense ministries, and the Blue House too, have people who
know how to get their stories across to foreigners — though
they’re not always happy with what the pesky foreign
journalists write, which brings us to the way foreign
journalists organize their own pools.

The Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club sets up pools in a
system that’s never been entirely clear to me. That’s
because, as an accredited correspondent with quite a long
experience here, I’m not eligible for the pool.

The reason seems to be that I can’t “take turns”
covering pool events that are of total non-interest to
anyone for whom I might file. In other words, if the prime
minister of Liliput or the president of Ruritania is coming
to town, and dropping by the Blue House, I’m not going to
cover it. Therefore, according to this rule, I can’t get
in on the pools that I might want to cover, whether it is
the U.S. secretary of defense or the aircraft carrier George
Washington.

The problem lies in part with the people who count on the
SFCC for pool coverage.

When Leon Panetta, the U.S. defense secretary, was here a while ago, the defense ministry gave
exactly two spots for Seoul-based correspondents to cover
his press conference. Some ministry official told me there
wasn’t enough room.

That struck me as odd. When the ministry was in much less
grand quarters a few years ago, there were plenty of seats
for foreign correspondents, including me, to cover a press
conference featuring Donald Rumsfeld, then the defense
secretary. A few years before that, I attended a press
conference by one of his predecessors, William Cohen, in the
same building. The room had seats to spare. After moving
into an enormous new edifice, did the ministry actually lose
space? Who would believe such an excuse?

Similarly, the last few times the aircraft carrier George
Washington was catapulting fighter planes off its deck on
war games around the Korean peninsula, the spokespeople at
U.S. Forces Korea opened up only a few spots for Seoul-based
correspondents — three or so for “pen” people, meaning
those who take notes rather than pictures. The GW is an
enormous vessel with huge resources.

There was no reason USFK could not have flown a plane full
of 20 or 30 journos or maybe arranged two or three trips,
all for less than the cost of an F18 firing its assortment
of weapons at imaginary targets.

In the old days off
Vietnam, I paid at least three visits to U.S. carriers,
including the Midway and Enterprise. There was no problem
finding space. Last time I was on a U.S. ship, a helicopter
carrier in the Mediterranean, the U.S. Navy information
officer wanted me to stay aboard to talk to more sailors —
no nonsense about a pool.

Sadly, the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club is partly to
blame for this problem. Both the defense ministry and USFK
accept the SFCC as the final arbiter on who joins the pool,
and the guardians of the SFCC pool, from major news
organizations with staff to spare to cover anything, won’t
admit individual correspondents.

There is no arguing with them, no questioning, and no room
for dissent. The SFCC system has a stranglehold over pool
coverage. The people who run the system adamantly refuse to
budge from their assumed power over who gets to dive into
the pool. That’s a problem I never encountered anywhere
else, in war or peace, from Vietnam to the Middle East.

One result of this system is that quite often the same
organizations are picked to cover the same events over and
over again.

Interestingly, the Voice of America, a U.S.
government operation that targets select foreign countries,
has had a slot on the last two or three lifts to the GW.
One has to wonder what would happen in a real war. Would the
doyens of the SFCC still hold the rights to all such
coverage? That’s a question as foreign bureaus zealously
exclude wayfarers and interlopers from their sacrosanct
pool. If the SFCC pool were a business, it would be charged
as a monopoly in restraint of trade.

  Blue House, Diving into the pool system: State media and the free press in S. Korea, foreign correspondents in South Korea, pool system for journalists, Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club