The Development of Korea Public TV Union Movement: The Case Study of MBC Strike in 2012

• Main Authors: Tian, Yu Jhih, 田育志
• Other Authors: Liu, Chang De
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/4xq7h8

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 新聞研究所 === 102 === As one of the public TV networks in Korea, MBC has lost the impartiality of broadcasting for its biased news reports and the unfair dismissal by the MBC’s president, Kim Jae-Chul, of producers and journalists who criticized the government. For protecting the value as a public TV, MBC employees ,led by the MBC union, started a 170-day strike in January, 2012. In order to realize the causes and effects of this strike, and the implications for the media union movement both in Taiwan and Korea, this study will examine the causes, the processes and the effects of the strike by using in-depth interview and secondary data analysis. According to the research data, the causes of the strike were due to political factions of MBC’s executive management and the ruling party, and the privatization of the MBC by Lee Myeong-Bak Administration; those two causes destroyed the impartiality of broadcasting, which was the central value that the public TV was supposed to protect. The strike had continued for 170 days with a high degree of participation from the MBC union and the supports from other media unions and the citizens. Unfortunately, after the strike, MBC was still neither able to protect the impartiality of broadcasting nor to maintain the organizational contract between the union and the management. Talking about the protecting of the impartiality of broadcasting, the MBC union considered that it could be a short-term target to reform the election system of president in MBC, but in the long-term, it needs the ruler to take the public TV as an independent media. Besides, through the strike which was started by protecting “the impartiality of broadcasting”, we can find out that not only the wage and welfare, but the professional values of media workers is the working condition that a union will be concerned about. And it’s so-called “the function of democracy” of the union which is a research finding by analyzing the MBC strike in 2012. Furthermore, the academic circle in Taiwan can also take the function of democracy as another viewpoint to analyze the media union.