디지털시대 언론피해구제 개선방향에 관한 연구

Abstract

The influence of internet media on the formation of public opinion has steadily increased in recent years. While the number of users of traditional news media in South Korea is decreasing, that of internet news media is rapidly increasing. This trend gave rise to a shift in the news ecosystem from a mass media-led society to one dominated by digital outlets. This shift resulted in more challenging and complex regulatory issues associated with press arbitration. One of the noticeable changes in the digital era is the entrance of various digital news outlets into the news distribution market. In this context, three research questions were identified. First, how has the diffusion of digital news media affected the current ecosystem of news production, distribution, and consumption? Second, what are the issues associated with the effectiveness of press arbitration in the newly emerged digital news ecosystem? Third, what kinds of policy suggestions can be made to better protect individuals’ reputations and privacy in the digital age? This study focuses on the concept of digital intermediaries, regarding them as a useful analytical tool to explain the recent dynamics of digital news distribution. This concept was also introduced to broaden the scope of press arbitration into the newly emerged news space in order to incorporate such entities as sites for news aggregation, news comment, social media, and a variety of news curation services. In addition, the press arbitration law must be revised to better protect individuals’ basic rights, which might otherwise be damaged by newly emerged digital news outlets including digital intermediaries. Along this line, this paper suggests that the press arbitration law include a clause addressing the right to erase false, erroneous, or irrelevant news reports. Arguing that internet space, in spite of its increasing importance for the formation of public opinion, has not been appropriately taken into account with regard to press arbitration, this study demands a more aggressive regulatory regime that will effectively reprieve innocent people whose basic rights were infringed by false or unethical news reports. However, it also points out that freedom of the press must not be threatened by this more aggressive regulatory system. The four modalities of law, norm, market, and architecture proposed by Lessig (1999) offer a useful guideline with which we can deepen our understanding of regulatory issues associated with press arbitration in the digital age. First, the present study suggests that the regulatory scope of press arbitration be expanded into the realm of different kinds of digital intermediaries exercising a certain level of influence in terms of share of news usage. Many complex issues related to measurement of the influence of each digital news outlet were not discussed because they go beyond the scope of this study. Third, emphasis upon the normative constraints regarding both journalistic professionalism and civic virtue of internet users was included as a policy option to diffuse the civic-oriented norm into cyberspace. Third, market-based institutions that measure individuals’ communicative performances in terms of civility were also proposed. Finally, the concept of architecture or code was included. Internet architecture designed to reduce uncivilized speech will alleviate the high cost associated with legal efforts to regulate online speech. Legal action such as revision of press arbitration law needs to be supplemented by other measures in the fields of norm, market, and architecture of technology.