Chapter 24. Suspicion (1)
Harok's phone had been flashing nonstop since eight in the morning.
Flash, flash, flash.
He had deliberately put it on silent.
Calls in the morning were expected.
There was no point answering them.
All that would do was make him go to work earlier.
A reporter who had worked the night shift didn't have to come in until two in the afternoon.
"Ughhh."
Harok woke up around noon, washed up slowly, opened the window at his leisure, and lit a cigarette.
His room was a semi-basement unit.
If he opened the window, the parking lot was immediately visible.
And right in front of him was the Porsche Yubin had left behind.
Phewww.
When the hell is she taking that car home?
Knock, knock, knock.
Who is knocking at this hour?
Wearing nothing but his boxers with a cigarette between his lips, Harok walked to the door.
"Who is it?"
"Upstairs."
A man's voice.
Then there was no particular need to put on more clothes.
Click.
Harok opened the door.
Standing there was the civil service exam student who had tried to hit on Yubin.
I knew he looked familiar.
He lives upstairs?
"What is it?"
"The Porsche in the parking lot belongs to your girlfriend, right?"
She wasn't his girlfriend.
But explaining that sounded annoying, so Harok let it slide.
"So?"
"How many days has she been illegally parking in front of the building? Parking space is already tight enough as it is."
The guy didn't exactly look like someone who even owned a car himself.
Was he just picking a fight?
Still, Yubin was the one illegally occupying a parking space, so Harok couldn't really argue.
"Fine. I'll get it moved soon."
I really need to tell her to pick that thing up...
Flash, flash, flash.
His silenced phone continued lighting up nonstop.
Seol Yubin.
"Senior, where are you?"
"Home."
"What? Didn't the company call you?"
"My phone's on silent."
Silence.
Harok could practically imagine Yubin's dumbfounded face wondering what kind of reckless lunatic did something like that.
"The editor-in-chief summoned everyone this morning. Last night's night editor, all the night-duty reporters, everyone."
"What about you?"
"I wrote the article, so obviously I got called in too."
"Did the editor-in-chief explode?"
"He couldn't openly rage, which somehow made him even angrier."
"Any other outlets follow it?"
"Handong Group's entire PR office mobilized. They blocked all the evening papers. A few articles pop up online, but they disappear from the portals almost immediately."
"So only the tiny internet outlets are celebrating."
"Apparently, among the advertising people, everyone's partying because Handong Group opened its vault."
Of course they were celebrating.
Even conglomerates didn't throw money around like this very often.
"How do you even hear what's going on in Advertising?"
"I've got informants there too."
She really does know people everywhere.
Even in Advertising.
"So is our article just going to end as a tiny breeze inside a teacup...?"
"Don't be disappointed yet. Netizens are carrying the article into online communities one after another. Public opinion is really bad."
"Communities?"
"Yes. Traffic from communities is exploding. Ours is basically the only article out there, but Handong Group and Kwon Jaegwan are number one and number two in portal searches."
The times had changed.
No matter how much traditional media suppressed coverage, they couldn't block online communities too.
Once something became an issue at that scale, even the police would be put in a difficult position.
They would have to take some kind of action.
"Even if reporters aren't writing articles, they'll still ask the police about it. Is there no briefing?"
"How did you know? There's one at two this afternoon."
"Handong Group is screwed."
"All the terrestrial broadcasters are coming, so I'm looking forward to it."
Broadcasting companies were in a very different situation from newspapers.
Terrestrial broadcasters in particular didn't directly sell their own advertising.
The broadcasting advertising corporation sat in the middle.
In other words, because terrestrial broadcasters didn't personally solicit advertisers, they were relatively freer from advertiser pressure.
And every once in a while, one of those broadcasters would run a no-holds-barred report and utterly destroy a company.
"They didn't delete our article, did they?"
"It already went into print, so even the editor-in-chief can't do much about it. If he takes it down now, I think even the union would make a fuss."
Harok quietly placed his hopes on the terrestrial broadcasters.
If they covered the story aggressively, the newspapers would find it difficult to remain silent.
The moment Harok arrived at work, Lee Munhong called him over.
"Baek Harok."
"Yes."
"Sleep well?"
From the look of him, Kim Yeonghwan must have chewed him out thoroughly that morning.
That's why you should've gone home after drinking instead of coming back.
"Well enough."
"Go see the editor-in-chief. And you know, right? I never saw that article last night."
Harok was secretly grateful to Lee Munhong.
Without Lee Munhong's very active cooperation through deliberate inaction, the story would never have seen the light of day.
Harok bowed sincerely.
"Department Head, thank you for looking after me all this time. I'll work hard in the culture department too."
"Yeah. Try to live quietly over there."
Pat, pat.
Lee Munhong lightly tapped Harok on the shoulder.
"Why did you wait until the street edition instead of putting the Kwon Jaegwan article into the sixth edition?"
The moment Kim Yeonghwan saw Harok, he immediately demanded to know why the article had only been inserted into the seventh edition.
"Wait until the street edition?"
Harok played dumb.
What was Kim Yeonghwan going to do if he simply denied it?
"Seol Yubin filed the article at eleven p.m. But apparently you spent more than two hours desk-editing it."
"It named the heir to one of the country's largest conglomerates. Of course I had to be careful. One small mistake and we'd be facing a lawsuit worth hundreds of millions."
Put that way, even Kim Yeonghwan had no obvious counterargument.
"So everything last night was just one coincidence after another?"
"Was there some reason the Kwon Jaegwan article wasn't supposed to go out? It sounds like the police are going to confirm it soon anyway."
Because of Harok, Kim Yeonghwan had lost his chance to pull in one billion won.
He ground his teeth.
But there was no proper way to punish Harok over this.
"...Get out."
"Where are you right now?"
"At the briefing, obviously."
"I forgot to say this earlier, but pick up your car today."
"Today? I told you I'm meeting a Ministry of Labor official tonight."
Right.
She had said she was going to the Ministry of Labor.
If she was going for reporting, Harok couldn't exactly complain.
"I don't even know how many parking violation stickers are on it now. Complaints keep coming in. Move it quickly."
"I'll stop by your place on the way back to Seoul and get it."
"Make sure you do it today."
"Yes."
Harok was just about to hang up when Yubin spoke again.
"Oh, Senior."
"What?"
"You were on TV yesterday."
"Why would I be on TV?"
"Your voice was on MBS's Wednesday."
Only then did Harok remember the phone interview with the producer a few days earlier.
That aired yesterday?
"Did you watch it?"
"No. Senior Gu Wonung told me about it."
"What did he say?"
"He said it was pretty normal."
Harok unpacked the things he'd been preparing to take home.
Then he opened his laptop and booted it up.
He went to the MBS website and watched the replay of the previous day's Wednesday episode.
"The garbage dumpling scandal left a deep scar on our society... One of the causes was the small scale of the manufacturers involved. In advanced countries, food sanitation laws..."
"However, as major corporations have recently begun entering the domestic food industry one after another, changes in the market structure are expected."
The segment barely discussed things like the social cost created by the dumpling scandal.
Even though the original reports had already established that the dumplings weren't actually garbage, the documentary kept emphasizing hygiene problems.
Then, almost naturally, it began endorsing the entry of large corporations into the food industry.
The real problem was the way Harok's comments had been cut and quoted in a bizarre way.
"Well, since they're mostly small and medium-sized companies, there are some weaknesses in sanitation management."
"If it's a major corporation, they'll care about their reputation, so they'll probably invest more heavily in sanitation..."
Quoting out of context.
Taking only part of a statement while ignoring its overall meaning and thereby distorting the speaker's intent.
It was practically a basic skill installed in every Korean journalist.
Politics was no different.
Someone's entire statement would be ignored, and a single line would be pulled out and attacked.
It was a particularly dirty tactic.
There had once been a famous politician running for the National Assembly who was cornered after being accused of insulting the elderly.
He had been attacked relentlessly for supposedly saying that elderly people should stay home instead of voting.
In context, however, he had been emphasizing that the future belonged to people in their twenties and thirties.
To strengthen that point, he had added that older generations didn't necessarily need to vote for the sake of that future.
That single line had caused an enormous controversy.
The previous day's Wednesday episode claimed to examine the problems with the police and media revealed by the garbage dumpling scandal and discuss how they should be improved.
But if you looked just a little more carefully, it still blamed the small scale of manufacturers as one of the causes.
And from there, it built the argument that major corporations entering the market could solve the problem.
"..."
Harok had never seen such shameless self-serving logic.
Why had they structured the argument like that?
Anyone watching would think the program was acting as a spokesperson for conglomerates entering the food industry.
Harok considered immediately calling Producer Yang Sejong to complain.
But wasn't this exact kind of selective quotation something Harok himself had used before?
Did the pot really have the right to curse the kettle?
Yang Sejong had probably just made what the people funding the production wanted.
Then TS Group's Lee Jinbaek suddenly came to mind.
Harok remembered talking about something similar the last time they met.
Hadn't Lee Jinbaek said TS Foodnet would soon enter the dumpling market?
Could Lee Jinbaek be the planner behind the dumpling scandal?
He had been working in TS Group's control tower, the Strategic Coordination Office, before moving to a small company called TS Foodnet.
Anyone looking at it would assume it was a demotion.
Maybe he plans to return to the Strategic Coordination Office by making Foodnet's new dumpling business a success?
Did he engineer the dumpling scandal for that?
But that was too unrealistic.
Lee Jinbaek was only an executive director.
People outside might hear "executive" and think it was impressive, but TS Group had hundreds of executive directors.
How could one ordinary conglomerate executive move the entire Korean police organization however he wanted?
No matter how many times Harok thought it over, identifying Lee Jinbaek as the planner seemed unreasonable.
At the same time...
There was always the one-in-ten-thousand possibility.
Let's poke at him a little.
Harok had suggested simply speaking over the phone, but Lee Jinbaek insisted they meet in person.
That might actually be better.
People didn't communicate only with words.
Their gestures and expressions said plenty too.
On the phone, you couldn't see the other person's face or body language, which made it harder to understand what they truly meant.
That was why Harok preferred face-to-face meetings whenever he was doing important reporting.
"Sorry, sorry. I'm a little late."
Lee Jinbaek had chosen a quiet café near TS Foodnet's headquarters.
They had agreed to meet at nine, but Lee Jinbaek didn't appear until nine-thirty.
"No, it's fine."
"I'm losing my mind over the dumplings we're launching soon."
I was going to ask about that, and he brought up dumplings first.
Perfect.
"Senior, did you watch MBS's current affairs documentary Wednesday yesterday?"
"Of course. Keep this to yourself, but our company actually paid the entire production budget for that program."
He's admitting it that easily?
"You can control a terrestrial broadcast program that freely?"
Lee Jinbaek leaned back against his chair and grinned.
"Come on. We're both professionals here. You think broadcasting stations don't have salaries to pay?"
"That's true, but I thought broadcasters were much freer from money than newspapers..."
"That's ancient history. Haven't you been following recent media trends?"
"What trends?"
"Advertising revenue for legacy media is stagnant or declining, while new-media advertising keeps hitting record highs every year."
Of course Harok knew that.
Still, current affairs producers at terrestrial broadcasters were famous for being extremely stubborn about editorial independence.
Trying to negotiate with them using advertising money usually didn't work.
But if you fund the entire production, they'll make a documentary like that?
Apparently terrestrial broadcasting really had changed.
It made the saying nobody can beat money feel painfully real.
"But isn't there something ethically questionable about major corporations rushing into the dumpling market while the existing manufacturers are collapsing?"
"Sorry to say it, but for us, it's an opportunity."
"Ah..."
"Someone is going to take that market share anyway. Our decision to enter the dumpling market was made before this scandal happened."
He sounded like the embodiment of cold corporate capitalism.
"Our company is simply making the most of the opportunity we've been given."
"But was the dumpling scandal really just an opportunity that happened to fall into your lap?"
"What do you mean?"
Lee Jinbaek's expression turned cold for a moment.
Harok wasn't the kind of person to shrink under that gaze.
"I'm investigating the dumpling scandal again, and there are a few things that don't sit right with me."
"You're investigating it again?"
He seemed genuinely surprised by that part.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I'm looking for the mastermind who deliberately set the dumpling scandal in motion."
