Medi a
Edited by Elaine Ramirez (elaine@groovekorea.com)
Story by Clint Stamatovich / Photo by Fergus Scott
michael breen Influence Author, journalist, Korea consultant Residence Seoul Featured in Groove Korea December 2008
Michael Breen, from Aylesbury, U.K., has been steadily making waves in Korea since 1982, when he relocated here as a correspondent for The Guardian, The Washington Times and The Times. During his time working and studying in Korea, he’s been a journalist, author and director and CEO of his own consultancy, penning three novels, acting as a buffer for with Unification Church (the “Moonies”) leader Sun Myung Moon and making international headlines when Samsung attempted to sue him over a satirical column. Breen, who graduated from the University of Edinburgh, took up the mantle of the first non-Korean president of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club in 1987. In 1994, he became a management consultant with a focus on North Korea. He wrote an unauthorized biography, “Sun Myung Moon: The Early Years” (1999), on Moon, the Unification Church founder and a self-proclaimed messiah. In the early 1990s, as a proponent for Moon’s The Washington Times, he met with North Korea’s leader, on the bleeding edge of Korean political affairs. “I was in a group with some ex-heads of state, along with CNN and NHK, and we had three and a half hours with Kim Il-sung,” Breen recalls.
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“There is absolutely no difference between the people up there and down here — same language, inflexions of speech, same faces — but the worlds they inhabit are totally different. The North Koreans were so afraid that they averted their eyes lest a foreigner talk to them and get them into trouble.” In the same decade, Breen became interested in long-term political prisoners, communists who refused to renounce their ideologies. Meeting with two men who’d been confined for 43 years, Breen recorded messages from their family members. “In Pyongyang, I met the wife and child of one of these men who had actually been released,” he says. “I brought their taped message and sat in front of him as he listened to their voices for the first time since the Korean War.” A tongue-in-cheek article he wrote in 2009 for The Korea Times that poked fun at Korean public figures including Samsung, garnered mounds of negative media attention. Samsung intended to sue Breen, the publisher and editor for $1 million each for libel, but the case was ultimately thrown out after Breen apologized. On the same day that Samsung sued Breen, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Korean president pardoned Samsung’s chairman,
Lee Kun-hee, for tax evasion. The proceedings illuminated the growing concern that chaebol, Korea’s large family-owned corporations, maintained supremacy over more than just the market. Since then, local media outlets have finally started to probe deeper than the epidermal levels of society. His nonfiction book “The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies” (1998) outlines how Korea developed from an agricultural society to a technology leader at an exponential rate from the end of the Korean War, and provides a unique point of view into the economy, culture and society culminated from Breen’s three-decade experience. The book was praised by reviewers in both The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Nowadays, Breen, an honorary citizen of Seoul, contributes opinion columns to The Korea Times and international outlets and runs his own public relations firm, Insight Communications Consultants, in Seoul. “Now that I run my own company I can set a certain culture based on my own beliefs and values. My attitude to colleagues is that we are all on our own path in life and this is the moment when those paths cross,” he says. More info http://insightcomms.com