The State of Things at Fox News

A recent article from Fox News regarding the ouster of then-South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol is a shining example of how polarized and (quite frankly) shoddy journalism reaches the public.

Despite a plethora of experts, policy-makers, politicians, political scientists and academics, the Fox News journalist hinges their entire article on the views of one expert.

The expert hails from the Middle East Media Research Institute, an organization that claims to “analyze political, social, cultural, and religious trends within Middle Eastern and South Asian media.”

The organization was founded in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, a former Israeli intelligence officer and counterterrorism adviser to two former Israeli prime ministers. He co-founded the group with Meyrav Wurmser, who worked for the Hudson Institute, a right-of-centre think tank, according to Influence Watch.

The organization is closely tied to the US government and has weathered their fair share of controversies regarding their translations and coverage of events.

None of this information is explained nor is a disclosure given in the article.

Instead, the expert is simply given a platform to pontificate about how the political turmoil surrounding the South Korean presidency - including the lead up to the implementation of martial law on December 3, 2024 and the sequence of events after - is all due to China’s influence (read: foreign interference).

Nowhere in the article are the South Korean people credited for their political advocacy, nor the politicians who fought their way into the National Assembly, nor the average citizens filling the streets for weeks on end protesting Yoon. There is no historical context given as to why democracy has a long legacy on the peninsula (hello, the Gwangju uprising, anyone?)

Instead we have the word of one expert claiming China was the mastermind behind Yoon’s removal from power in order to “expand their influence in the region.”

Despite it being a story about South Korea, no South Koreans are given a voice. Instead the expert refers to one Korean they allegedly spoke to - and the journalist quotes a second voice (of a Yoon supporter) ripped out of context from an Associated Press article to underline their supposed point.

“Mahjar-Barducci also claimed that one Korean activist who spoke to her on Friday told her that election fraud in South Korea had been organized in cooperation with China, whose government had unduly influenced the past two general elections.”

There is no evidence given to support these claims and the journalist clearly did not push back or investigate any further.

That’s it.

That’s the “proof” in this story.

Instead there is a reference to the CCP’s use of “elite capture” aka influencing decision-makers in politics or business….again with no evidence.

There’s no denying that “elite capture” is a tactic the CCP uses, but it’s not the only state that does so, not by a long shot.

Yet this article insists that China is the boogeyman who can covertly topple a conservative political empire in another country — according to one expert.

If we want to talk about ‘foreign interference’ in South Korea, we should speak of how the U.S. has kept a massive presence on the Korean Peninsula since the war.

Camp Humphreys is like its own city, with thousands of American troops and personnel.

So who is influencing who?

Statistically, which country do you think has the most outside voice in Korean politics?

In my opinion an article this biased should never have been green lit…but that’s the state of things at Fox News.