You are being recorded

People record conversations because they do not trust words to hold. When statements change, recordings become insurance, freezing the moment like a photograph.

Chae Byung-gun

The author is an editorial writer of the JoongAng Ilbo.

It is difficult to make sense of this by any common standard. Why would lawmakers from the same party record one another during a meeting? Were they spies from hostile states? The idea strains credulity. The contents of the recording are even more startling. Ahead of the 2022 local elections, after an aide was alleged to have received 100 million won, then-Democratic Party (DP) lawmaker Kang Sun-woo is heard pleading, “Please save me.” At the time, Kim Byung-kee, then secretary of the DP’s Seoul nomination committee, responds with visible unease, saying, “Why would you even discuss something like that with me?” He tries to distance himself, adding that it is a problem Kang must resolve on her own. Kang, sounding close to tears, laments, “How did I end up like this?” The exchange is so vivid that the scene seems to unfold before the listener’s eyes.

Jung Chung-rae, leader of the Democratic Party, and Kim Byung-kee, then the party’s floor leader, talk during a Supreme Council meeting at the National Assembly in Yeouido, Seoul, on Dec. 15, 2025, before issues involving Kim became public. [NEWS1]

The speed at which the DP has run into trouble is striking. It has been only seven months since the party took power. Barely half a year after the president’s inauguration, a series of controversies has already surfaced within the ruling camp. Allegations of lawmaker Lee Choon-suak’s stock investments under borrowed names were followed by text messages seeking personnel favors, in which the requester addressed Kim Hyun-ji, the party leader’s chief of staff, as “sister.” Now, a recording of the 2022 “100 million won conversation” has emerged.

The “please save me” recording did not end there. It has spread to yet another alleged recording tied to a petition submitted during the 2020 general elections. According to the claim, a petition alleging that Kim Byung-kee’s side demanded money in exchange for a nomination was delivered to the party leadership in 2023 by former lawmaker Lee Soo-jin. An aide reportedly confirmed that it had reached the party leader. That exchange, too, is said to have been recorded. In the DP, recordings appear to beget more recordings.

It is not normal for a ruling party, only half a year into its term, to be engulfed by such cascading allegations. The content of the recordings is abnormal. So, too, is the party’s posture once suspicions surface. Rather than showing caution and sensitivity to public sentiment, party leaders have treated the cases as isolated personal lapses, showing little fear or urgency. When allegations of Unification Church lobbying arose, the party abruptly proposed adding the Shincheonji Church to a special probe. It then pushed through amendments to telecommunications laws that it would have taken to the streets against had they been proposed by the previous Yoon Suk Yeol administration.

The reason is simple. Many voters, disillusioned with the DP, glance toward the other side only to find a party that appears even more disarrayed. The People Power Party (PPP) is consumed by internal squabbles that amount to little more than gossip to citizens struggling to make a living. In the long lineage from the Grand National Party to the Saenuri Party and now the PPP, it is hard to recall such childish and self-destructive infighting. The DP knows that even if public sentiment cools, it is unlikely to swing easily to the opposition.

When recordings keep surfacing above the waterline, it suggests how pervasive they are beneath it. At a broader level, this culture of recording reflects the depletion of what sociologists call trust capital in Korean society. People record conversations because they do not trust words to hold. When statements change, recordings become insurance, freezing the moment like a photograph.

Jang Dong-hyeok, leader of the People Power Party, greets reporters after announcing a party reform plan at the party’s headquarters in Yeouido, Seoul, on the morning of Jan. 7, 2026. [LIM HYUN-DONG]

Politics has been a chief culprit in draining that trust. Korean politics has shown remarkable tolerance for shifting words. With a change of administration, the Board of Audit and Inspection reverses its stance. Prosecutors change course and drop appeals. Reversals of campaign promises are treated as routine. A pledge not to raise property taxes morphs, after local elections, into a menu of higher holding taxes.

The ruling party and the government have responded passively to the controversy surrounding the Kim Byung-kee and Kang Sun-woo recordings. Rather than moving decisively to restore trust, they appear inclined to label the matter a personal deviation, expel those involved and let time dull the controversy. Critics fear a familiar sequence: delay, halfhearted indictments once attention fades and a final act in which prosecutors abandon appeals. That would reinforce a corrosive lesson that the state protects the powerful while leaving the weak to fend for themselves.

What emerges is a society that implicitly advises everyone to record first and trust later. That may be the most troubling signal of all.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.