Public Sentiment and its Place in Modern Korea

Lecturer: Michael Breen In recent years, we have heard a lot in Korea about public sentiment. The phrase sounds gentle enough like the addition of a soft layer of feeling to the idea of public opinion. But, actually, it is something altogether different. If you were puzzled this year by both the justification for and the speed with which President Park Geunhye was ousted, then you will find an explanation in public sentiment. If you were puzzled last year as to how a court could find executives in Korea for a certain foreign automaker who had translated advertisements about how nice their cars were and run them in Korean magazines guilty of criminality, the answer is public sentiment. If you wondered a few years back how the local head of an American fund could be jailed for five years for manipulating the share price of the bank it had bought when a) there was not a single piece of evidence and b) he wasnt even in charge at the time, you can guess that public sentiment played a big role