NYT writes about the troubles of a korean finance blogger that captured nation’s imagination to only end up in jail.
Park Dae-sung with his mother after his release from prison last month
SEOUL, South Korea
FOUR months ago, Park Dae-sung became South Korea’s most celebrated — and vilified — blogger, when he was arrested on charges of spreading false information on the Internet with malicious intent. Prosecutors accused Mr. Park, whose financial postings under the alias Minerva had attracted a cultlike following, of damaging the nation’s economy with his “extremely pessimistic forecasts.”
On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted in a court of law, but his troubles persist in the court of public opinion. In a society still negotiating the gulf between its traditionally hierarchical culture and the free-floating online world, he has been sharply criticized for, in effect, not being the authority figure most people had imagined him to be.
“I am disillusioned and disgusted,” Mr. Park said in an interview in his Seoul hide-out, where he was holed up to escape from most reporters, as well as online death threats. “I have seen the madness of Korean society. I can’t live here anymore. I want to emigrate.”
For months last year, Minerva riveted South Korea with his uncannily accurate analyses of the economy, his often scathing criticisms of government policy and his predictions of, among other things, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the collapse of the Korean currency, the won.
When some of his prognostications proved on target, readers dug up his earlier postings and eagerly awaited more. A civic group gave an award to the anonymous “citizen journalist.” A national television anchor called on the government to heed Minerva’s advice. Bookstores gave special displays to economics books recommended by Minerva.
It was not until January, with Mr. Park’s arrest, that the mystery of Minerva was finally solved. Mr. Park, 31 and jobless, had attended a two-year vocational college and had never even invested in the stock market. He was charged with spreading false information on the Internet “with intent to damage the public interest,” punishable by five years in prison.
Among his crimes, prosecutors said, was to state that the South Korean government had barred banks and major companies from buying American dollars in a desperate attempt to check the fall of the won.
On April 20, Mr. Park was acquitted on the grounds that, while not everything he wrote was correct, there was no evidence that he knew it was wrong or acted with malicious intent.
But his difficulties — at what seemed to be a moment of triumph — were far from over.
Mr. Park’s evolution from a former employee of a wireless communications company to a national sensation to an embittered outcast reads like a case study of what can happen to an unprepared blogger in this highly wired, and politically divisive, society.