Born in 1961, CHOI Seung-ho is an investigative journalist, TV producer and film director. Having joined public broadcaster MBC in 1986, he has been in charge of several current affairs shows as chief producer. He was involved in a national crisis in 2005 when, as the chief producer of <PD Notebook>, he was among the first to question HWANG Woo-suk’s experiments in human stem cell cloning and expose his ethical misconducts. This attack against a figure many saw as a ...More

Born in 1961, CHOI Seung-ho is an investigative journalist, TV producer and film director. Having joined public broadcaster MBC in 1986, he has been in charge of several current affairs shows as chief producer. He was involved in a national crisis in 2005 when, as the chief producer of <PD Notebook>, he was among the first to question HWANG Woo-suk’s experiments in human stem cell cloning and expose his ethical misconducts. This attack against a figure many saw as a national hero sparked a violent backlash from all sides and even led to the momentary cancellation of the show, but CHOI and his team later regained their credibility once their claims were proved well-founded. That wouldn’t be the last time CHOI’s show would be involved in controversy, though. In 2008, their report on the alleged higher risk of contracting mad cow disease by consuming US imported beef caused massive demonstrations against the US-Korea free trade agreement, and the production team faced censorship attempts by the government in 2010 when they investigated the South Korean rivers restoration project, a major part of the then South Korean president’s policy. That latter case earned CHOI to be named Producer of the Year by the Korean Producers’ Association, but also cost him his job, MBC firing him in 2012 under the pretext that he took part in a strike. In 2013, he joined Newstapa, Korea’s first nonprofit and independent online news outlet funded entirely through crowdfunding, where he would produce and anchor a weekly video report. He then took his fight to the theaters by making <Spy Nation> (2016), a documentary about the dozens of North Korean refugees who were falsely accused of being undercover spies by the South’s counterintelligence over the decades. Released right before the political scandal involving former president PARK Geun-hye broke out, the film probably benefited from the new-found interest for politics among the population since it attracted a respectable 144’000 viewers. With <Seven Years-Journalism without Journalist> (2016), he tackled a topic closer to his heart, the dismissal of journalists by state-owned networks MBC and KBS during the terms of former presidents LEE Myung-bak and PARK Geun-hye in order to silence critical voices, and released the next year a follow-up on this subject, <Criminal Conspiracy> (2017). In December 2017, following the change of government, CHOI was appointed president and chairperson of MBC.Less