Communication with reporters must continue

It is regrettable that President Yoon Suk-yeol stopped the casual — and daily — conversations with the media when he reports to work.

In a stunning decision, President Yoon Suk-yeol suspended his iconic “doorstep interviews” with the press, which started from his inauguration on May 10. The president has had 61 doorstep interviews with reporters in the presidential office except for the five-day national mourning period for the Itaewon tragedy. The presidential office cited a recent scuffle with an MBC reporter over the president’s earlier decision to ban him from boarding the presidential airplane for the APEC and G20 summits in Southeast Asia.

It is regrettable that President Yoon stopped the casual — and daily — conversations with the media when he reports to work. The unprecedented interviews he had were a brand effectively representing the conservative president in the new presidential office at Yongsan.

Past presidents also tried to boost their communication with the public, but stopped short of Yoon’s doorstep interview. Former president Kim Dae-jung introduced the “conversation with people” to help comfort Koreans struggling to survive the 1997-98 foreign exchange crisis. His successor Roh Moo-hyun did not shun pointed questions from journalists and even had a verbal fight with junior prosecutors when cameras were rolling. But there were limits to straight Q&As. Lee Myung-bak had a weekly radio address, but it was simply one-way communication. Park Geun-hye was criticized for her careful choreographing of the sequence and details of questions and answers. Moon Jae-in was attacked for a critical dearth of opportunities for direct questions and candid answers.

President Yoon must have had trouble having doorstep interviews because he could not prepare for unexpected questions from reporters in advance. His lack of a political career worsened the situation, as seen in his nonchalant rebuttal of mounting criticism on his appointments of unqualified top officials in his administration. “Did you see any better ministers in the previous administration than now?” he asked reporters. The MBC reporter certainly showed disrespect for the president, but it cannot serve as an excuse for the presidential office to set up a wall in the lobby and stop the doorstep interviews. That will backfire.

The interviews must continue. In the West, doorstep interviews are interviews aimed to pressure a head of state to provide candid answers to questions from journalists. Yoon’s presidential office could consider the idea of allowing reporters to access the president on his way to the helipad as in the White House. Or Yoon could drop by the pressroom in the presidential office for Q&A. He left the Blue House to depart with the imperial presidency of the past.