Lost Nomad had a short post about an article, and it is really worth reading if you want to understand just how bleeping hypocritical Korean society can be toward the US in Korea.

From the Donga newspaper

The government is taking emergency measures after perchlorate, known to cause thyroid disorders, was detected in a great quantity in the Nakdong River water system, an important source of drinking water for Yeongnam residents.

Fine.

I've been working on a project, as I mentioned before, looking at the KBS and MBC TV news archives for stories on "pollution" and have covered this year so far.

There really are a good number of stories about pollution. The vast majority are like this paragraph - generic notes about air, water, or soil pollution in different places throughout the nation.

The article continued

The water in which the concentration of perchlorate was detected surpassed the US EPA standard by 90 times was revealed to be water flowing into the Gumi Sewage Disposal Plant discharged from Gumi Industrial Complex 3.

So, unlike the majority of the other news stories, this one actually looked at possible sources of the pollution. But, what companies are in this complex?

I noted in a different post, I found a perfect example of how the Korean media (and thus society) treats pollution by big (Korean) business. The only examples of the news doing tough investigative reporting on pollutors was when the business was small. But, when it came to the chaebol (conglomerates) --- the media goes out of its way not to name them.

(See this page for a project I did looking at the Eng. language press - which often simply runs translations of its Korean langauge version - and comparing the number and type of stories done between pollution and the US in Korea and non-US related.)

I watched a report on stunted tree growth in a city known as a Hyundai stronghold, but Hyundai was never mentioned, and the camera blurred the focus so you could not see the names on the factories the couple of times they did show nearby factories in the footage.

And what do we have in this article:

The government advised company A that had been discharging large amounts of perchlorate through detergents to reduce the use and discharge of perchlorate.

Company A is known to have lowered the concentrations of perchlorate in the sewage from 16,060ppb to 70ppb from July 17 by running the biochemistry disposal facility.

Good old "Company A".