A Harebrained New York Times Contributor

When meeting with Korean affairs experts based in Washington, D.C., I often hear them mock The New York Times. This month, the ridicule was inspired by an opinion piece from Selig Harrison that came into the public eye earlier this month.

Harrison, somewhat of an idol for Korea’s left-leaning political bloc, argued in this piece that "the United States should redraw the disputed sea boundary, called the Northern Limit Line, moving it slightly to the south." Pointing out that the area was under U.S. jurisdiction when the U.N. forces first made the demarcation, Harrison even went so far as to claim that “President Obama has the authority to redraw the line.” This line of thinking is just as ludicrous as North Korea’s claim that South Korea is an American colony. An editor’s note attached to Harrison’s article now reveals that John Cushman, a U.S. military officer that served in Korea in the 1970s, was intended to co-author the piece but pulled his name at the last minute.

Jack Pritchard, a former special envoy to North Korea for the Bush administration, publicly criticized Harrison’s idea in an interview with the Chosun Ilbo. He accused Harrison of having little understanding of Korean history and politics, and declared that The New York Times was irresponsible for having run such an op-ed piece. A Korean expert I had lunch with today said that The New York Times editor was clumsy in dealing with North Korean issues.

Even if Harrison “sells” North Korea for a living, the editor that allowed the suggestion that President Obama redraw the Northern Limit Line is more idiotic than irresponsible.

A similar incident occurred recently. Donald Gregg, a former U.S. ambassador to Korea nicknamed the “Sunshine Policyist”, expressed his suspicions about the ROK government’s stance on the sinking of the Cheonan in an article in The New York Times last August. He even wrote that Kim Jong-Il’s son Kim Jung-Eun should have been invited to the White House. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wrote in The New York Times, quite irrelevantly, that the policy toward North Korea should be revised in the wake of the Cheonan incident. However, these men did not go so far as to suggest that the U.S. president should redraw the territorial line between North and South.

Let’s suppose that Canada were to provoke regional conflict by firing artillery into U.S. territory and killing civilians. I wonder what would happen if I suggested that, since the U.S. already has a lot of land, it should slightly lower its northern border with Canada. Or if I said that, since the U.S. is a former British colony, the U.K. prime minister could redraw the U.S.-Canada borders. No one in the U.S. would acknowledge these statements as legitimate opinions. It’s a good thing that The New York Times features such a diverse range of opinions in its pages. But such an irregular stance does not contribute to “diversity” of opinion.

Although The New York Times may be considered one of the most authoritative publications in America, it has shown very little “authority” on matters of the Korean peninsula. I don’t even want to mention the government’s ill-advised pattern of dismissing this type of misleading fodder.