Where Is Seoul’s Information Control Heading?

On June 9, 2025, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification issued a forceful demand to civic organizations: stop sending anti-North Korea leaflets across the border. It was the fifth day after President Lee Jae-myung had taken office. Two days later, at 2 p.m. on June 11, the president ordered the military to halt the loudspeaker broadcasts it had been directing toward North Korea. The order ended broadcasts that had resumed fifteen years earlier, following North Korea’s sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan in 2010.

In early July, the National Intelligence Service shut down radio and television broadcasts it had transmitted into North Korea for more than half a century. The radio services went off the air one after another, and the television broadcasts ended completely at midnight on July 14, after the South Korean national anthem played for the final time. Unlike the military’s loudspeakers, which successive governments had installed and removed depending on their political orientation, the National Intelligence Service’s broadcasts to North Korea had continued for fifty years regardless of who governed in Seoul. At 10 p.m. on August 31, the “Voice of Freedom” also ended its broadcasts. Of the radio services operated by the South Korean government and public institutions for North Korean audiences, only KBS Hanminjok Radio remained.

During the same period, the government opened a door in precisely the opposite direction. On December 30, 2025, the Ministry of Unification reclassified the Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, from restricted special material to general material, lifting access controls that had remained in place since 1970. Until then, the newspaper had been kept in closed archives and could be reviewed only for media reporting or academic research after the submission of a written pledge or formal application.

Now, anyone can enter the National Library of Korea, the National Assembly Library, national university libraries, and approximately 180 other institutions, read the Rodong Sinmun without any formal procedure, make copies, and take those copies outside. The decision came eleven days after the president said during a Ministry of Unification policy briefing that reading the Rodong Sinmun did not turn a person into a communist. During the same briefing, the president also ordered that Korean Central Television be opened to the South Korean public.

One point must be stated clearly. The Rodong Sinmun is not journalism. It is the official organ of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and exists to praise the supreme leader and the party. Whatever journalistic function it may once have performed disappeared long ago. Its pages are filled with honorifics such as “respected” and “great.” It conducts no independent reporting, performs no factual verification, and possesses no editorial autonomy. This is precisely what Reporters Without Borders described when it ranked North Korea 179th in the world.

Every media outlet in North Korea operates under the censorship and control of the Workers’ Party. Reporting is permitted only when it praises the party and its leadership, making independent journalism virtually impossible. South Korea’s vice minister of unification explained that the decision was intended to move away from a system in which state institutions monopolized and filtered North Korean information, allowing citizens instead to compare the information themselves and reach their own judgments. But what the government opened to the public was not independently reported and verified information about North Korea. It was propaganda produced to glorify Kim Jong Un and the Workers’ Party.

This paper has been co-published with The Korea Signal: Freedom of Expression Does Not Collapse in a Single Moment