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By Bradley Martin

Following repeated complaints by presidential staff that leading daily JoongAng Ilbo was slanting its coverage against the Kim Dae-jung government, South Korean authorities last month arrested the Seoul paper's chairman for tax evasion. That seemed more than coincidence to the newspaper, which screamed ''Conspiracy!''

The main opposition party seconded the charge - and last week one of its lawmakers produced what looked like an evidentiary smoking gun. A memo, said to come from the office of Lee Jong-chan, vice-president of the ruling National Congress for New Politics, outlined elaborate means for officials to tame the critical press through ''shock therapy'' - administrative and legal pressure including (you guessed it) investigations of tax evasion.

From there, the sequence of events has only become more bizarre. Originally said to have been written by a government official, the memo turns out to be the work of a reporter for JoongAng Ilbo itself - who says he composed it and sent it to his good friend Lee. And who leaked it to the opposition? It was stolen from Lee's office by another reporter, to whom the recipient of the leak gave the equivalent of thousands of dollars.

To say the least, both ruling and opposition parties have considerable explaining to do - as do the news media.

Previous, dictatorial governments in South Korea went to great lengths to control the press. In that they used the carrot - especially envelopes of cash, known as chonji, which politicians and bureaucrats routinely slipped to compliant journalists - and the stick of overt censorship and covert pressure on the media companies. That was all supposed to end with the coming of democratic elections, but it didn't.

On one level, the explosive document revealed to have been the work of JoongAng Ilbo reporter Moon Il-hyun seems to represent a journalist's cry of anguish at the corruption of some of his colleagues and at the regionalism that left residents of the country's Cholla provinces in the southwest marginalized for decades. Ultimately, though, it's a deeply cynical, anti-press document, the sort of thing that journalists might accuse Machiavellian politicians of authoring but are not supposed to even think about penning themselves.

Moon in his memo described his proposed plan as one of ''press reform''. In justification of the draconian measures proposed, he pointed to such abuses as chonji that he alleged had continued to be passed to certain crooked journalists during the 1992 and 1997 presidential election campaigns, by political factions from North and South Kyungsang provinces in the southeast. And he cited what he described as the habitual financial shenanigans of newspaper owners and executives - including tax evasion - that would naturally create a conflict of interest with the economic reforms being pressed by the Kim Dae-jung government.

Leaders from Kyungsang controlled the country during the long dictatorial period and even afterward, during the rule of former President Kim Young-sam. It was only with the 1997 election of Kim Dae-jung, from South Cholla province, that the despised Cholla region in the southwest started to gain even remotely fair representation. Moon in his document worried that leading newspapers had resumed fanning anti-Cholla sentiments. While it's not clear from South Korean press reports whether Moon himself is from Cholla, such an origin clearly would fit with his actions.

In Beijing, where he has been on sabbatical pursuing a PhD at a local university, Moon held a press conference on Thursday to explain himself. According to Yonhap's account, he said he had called his friend Lee in late June and ''he told me that the political situation of the country worried him.'' So on his own initiative Moon decided to help out and came up with his memo, hoping it would be of small help to Lee, he said. ''Moon apologized for the political controversy caused by his writing while deploring the opposition party's abuse of his writing for its political purposes,'' Yonhap reported.

Whatever his concerns for the national welfare and the success of his friend Lee, Moon nevertheless has - as the Korea Herald put it in an editorial published Monday - contributed his ''professional expertise to what seems to be an appalling scheme to suppress the freedom of speech''. Moon's own paper said his memo, although written months ago, ''is almost a blueprint of what has happened to JoongAng, including the arrest of our publisher''. Moon ''clearly stated that arrest for tax evasion was an effective tactic, although he could not have known that it would be used on his own employer''.

The circumstantial evidence that the ruling party and the government adopted Moon's plan is strong - but Lee, the party vice-president to whom the memo was sent (and who is also the former chief of the country's intelligence service), denies that he ever read it.

Meanwhile, Chung Hyung-keun, the opposition Grand National Party (GNP) lawmaker who publicly revealed the document, is in trouble for having failed to say how he got it. When it turned out that Lee Do-jun of Pyonghwa Broadcasting Corporation stole it for him from Lee Jong-chan's office, the next question was what relationshlp Chung had with the PBC reporter. Chonji was the eventual answer. Chung admitted he had given Lee 10 million won ($8,300) to help with the reporter's ''financial difficulties'' - although he insisted that the payments had been made long before the receipt of the document and denied any quid pro quo.

The government quickly got onto the PBC reporter's case. On Monday, JoongAng Ilbo reported, the Seoul District Public Prosecutor's Office asked for a warrant to arrest him for larceny.

Both the ruling party and the GNP (many of whose members were in power during previous governments) vow to investigate each other's actions - including the involvement if any of President Kim Dae-jung and of the opposition leader who lost to Kim in the presidential election - in the National Assembly. And the GNP over the weekend appealed to international press watchdog bodies to look into the matter.

Meanwhile, the government is keeping up the pressure on the press, following the advice of Moon - who counseled that any slacking off in the face of opposition would be interpreted as a sign that the government was out to get the papers involved.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission announced on Sunday that it was investigating four sports dailies - including Sports Chosun, which is owned by the conservative and fiercely anti-Kim Dae-jung general-interest paper Chosun Ilbo - for newspaper price collusion. And it said it had been investigating the other two top-selling newspapers, JoongAng Ilbo and Dong-A Ilbo, since September to see if they were illegally giving away copies to inflate their circulation figures.

As the Korea Herald editorialized, ''a brief review of these developments should leave any sane person dumbfounded.''

(Special to Asia Times Online)