President Lee Jae-myung, who is visiting Europe, again issued a strongly worded message criticizing the practice of "reporter front-running."
On the 13th, the president said this through his social media (SNS) X account, sharing the news that the Financial Supervisory Service's capital markets special judicial police arrested an economic news reporter, a broker, and others on charges of stock price manipulation.
The president called the case a "normalization of the abnormal," urging those who use articles as a weapon to disrupt the market to stop immediately and return to the proper duties of a journalist.
The case uncovered this time is known as a crime in which a broker ring, including certified public accountants, drafted a favorable-issue article about specific corporations, passed it to reporters they knew, and induced them to publish simultaneously at an agreed time. Some of the reporters involved was found to have bought shares before the articles were released and then resold them after publication when the stock prices surged, reaping hundreds of millions of won in gains.
The president also encouraged those implicated in the crime to voluntarily report themselves. He added that public-interest whistleblowers would receive reduced penalties and reward payments.
The president emphasized, "All behaviors that harm law-abiding citizens who follow the rules and profit by breaking them are the abnormality of a bygone era," adding, "To build a Korea where we all prosper, normalizing all abnormalities is an unavoidable task of our time."