Unanswered Questions issued an apology after eight years over a broadcast that raised allegations tying President Lee Jae-myung to organized crime, but the article reporting that apology again came under fire for using the hashtag "murder."
On the 20th, President Lee Jae-myung wrote on X (formerly Twitter), "I wonder whether Unanswered Questions, which created the allegation that Lee Jae-myung was linked to organized crime, will calmly run a follow-up report, and if so, what it will report."
This refers to part of the July 21, 2018, broadcast of SBS Unanswered Questions (hereafter Unanswered Questions), the episode "Power and organized crime: one year after the Pattaya murder case," which raised suspicions of collusion between the international Mafia faction active in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, and then-Gyeonggi Province governor Lee Jae-myung. At the time, then-Gyeonggi Province governor Lee Jae-myung said, "The suspicion of collusion between the international Mafia faction active in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, and Gyeonggi Province governor Lee Jae-myung," and filed a complaint against Unanswered Questions.
Pulling the broadcast back into public view after about eight years, President Lee Jae-myung said, "Thanks to Kim Sang-joong's 'real acting,' I was suddenly branded a 'murderous gangster.' This broadcast appears to be one of the operations used to remove me: physical terror, manipulation of judicial risk through the prosecution, and an image-damaging operation through the media," adding, "The producing director in charge was transferred to Unanswered Questions and this was his first work; I heard he left Unanswered Questions soon after. I wonder whether he still considers me linked to organized crime. After this broadcast, they said they would make follow-up programs, solicited tips from the entire nation for months, and deployed a large reporting team to comb Seongnam's streets thoroughly—was there even a single clue among the tips?"
President Lee Jae-myung in particular said, "If there had been even a speck of evidence, they would not have failed to run follow-up reports. To prevent the political burying of a person in a grave of lies from recurring, the people who exposed the manipulation, the People Power Party, or manipulative broadcasts like Unanswered Questions need to reflect and apologize. It may be asking too much, but I want to hear a sincere word of apology."
After the broadcast, the Bundang Police Station in Gyeonggi Province opened an investigation and in November 2018 forwarded the case to the prosecution with a recommendation of non-prosecution; the Seongnam branch that took over the case issued a non-prosecution disposition in December 2018. The Supreme Court, ahead of the 2021 presidential election, applied the crime of false statement under the Public Official Election Act to a lawyer who claimed that candidate Lee Jae-myung received money from the Seongnam international Mafia faction, and on March 12 last week upheld a final sentence of one year in prison with a two-year suspended sentence.
While the alleged link between then-Gyeonggi Province governor Lee Jae-myung and the Seongnam international Mafia faction was confirmed to be legally untrue, Unanswered Questions apologized after about 10 hours, saying, "We apologize for raising suspicions without certain grounds, such as the claim that then-Gyeonggi Province governor Lee Jae-myung was included in the list of defense attorneys."
But the controversy did not end there. In the process of posting the article containing the apology to its social account, SBS inserted the hashtag "murder." Netizens questioned whether Unanswered Questions' apology was sincere.
SBS again apologized, saying, "We confirmed that a word inappropriate for the content was included in an automatically generated hashtag on some of the SNS posts and have deleted the hashtag. We will be more careful in managing hashtags. We apologize." The post in question has been deleted.
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