"Return to principled journalism"

President Lee Jae Myung speaks at a dinner meeting with Korean diaspora members at a hotel in Brussels, Belgium, on June 9 (local time). [Yonhap]
President Lee Jae Myung speaks at a dinner meeting with Korean diaspora members at a hotel in Brussels, Belgium, on June 9 (local time). [Yonhap]

President Lee Jae Myung has sharply criticized the practice of journalists front-running stocks — writing articles to inflate share prices and then profiting from the resulting moves.

In a post on his X account Saturday, Lee warned those involved to "stop the stock manipulation that leads to ruin and return to being principled journalists who write with integrity."

Lee linked to a news report published Friday on a journalist front-running case and framed his remarks as part of what he called "normalizing the abnormal."

According to KBS on Friday, the Financial Supervisory Service's capital markets special judicial police detained two key suspects — a media broker and a sitting journalist — in the course of its investigation into the front-running scheme.

According to the FSS special police probe, three journalists published nearly 2,000 articles at the direction of broker A, a certified public accountant by background, generating illicit profits of about 9 billion won (approximately $5.89 million).

Lee said that for those already implicated, "if you come forward and report it as a public-interest tip, penalties can be reduced and a reward will be paid — so I encourage you to turn yourselves in."

He added that "all conduct that harms law-abiding citizens by breaking the rules for personal gain is the abnormality of a bygone era," and said that "to build a South Korea where everyone prospers together, normalizing every abnormality is an unavoidable task of our time."


balme@heraldcorp.com