A party banner containing content about election fraud is posted on the roadside in Chipyeong-dong, Seo-gu, Gwangju. 2025.11.13 [Photo=Yonhap News] 

The World After Black and White

Black-and-white logic has long been the basis of legitimacy.

Simple distinctions like right and wrong, good and evil, friend and foe, were powerful tools for uniting society. Power, institutions, and laws were all built upon this foundation.

However, modern society can no longer be explained by this framework. Interests have become complex, information is abundant, and values and standards are diversified. As the space between black and white rapidly widened, society naturally began to fill that void with 'gray'.

The problem starts here.

The existence of gray areas has become an undeniable reality, but consensus on how to handle this grayness has not been sufficiently established. While we have moved beyond the simplicity of black and white, we have failed to properly establish what we should use for judgment instead.

The result is neutrality without standards, compromise without principles, negotiation without explanation, and ambiguity without responsibility.

The problem is not the increase in gray areas, but the failure to establish a new system of standards for handling them.

Two Conflicts Created by Gray Areas: Allegations of Election Fraud and Distrust in Judicial Institutions

This structure is most clearly evident in two conflicts in contemporary Korean society: the controversy surrounding allegations of election fraud and the debate over the neutrality of judicial institutions.

Allegations of election fraud have been a core theme of social conflict for several years now. Supreme Court rulings exist. Legally, a conclusion has been reached. Nevertheless, the debate has not ended.

The reason is simple. While a judgment has been presented, the procedures and standards leading to that conclusion have not been sufficiently explained.

Those raising allegations point to administrative flaws and insufficient verification procedures, while those defending the system emphasize the final conclusion of the court's judgment.

Both sides have their own grounds, but there is a lack of common standards to bridge the gap. Ultimately, the debate has solidified not as a verification of facts, but as a clash of interpretations. This is a typical collision in a gray area.

The controversy surrounding the neutrality of judicial institutions follows the same structure.

Conflicts surrounding arrest warrants, indictments, and trial outcomes stem not from the question of 'what is the truth,' but from 'what standards were applied?'

When an perception builds that some cases are treated strictly while others are handled loosely, people doubt the process rather than the outcome.

When the media, in reporting on trials and investigations, amplifies certain frames rather than mediating these interpretation battles, trust in the system collapses more rapidly.

The commonality shown by these two examples is clear. Gray areas inevitably exist, but the rules for operating within that grayness have been insufficient.

The Media at the Center of Interpretive Power... Public Broadcasting, Another Form of Power

However, there is an entity standing at the heart of this structural failure: the media.

The most powerful force in modern society is not the power to determine truth, but the power to interpret truth. And the group that exercises this interpretive power most broadly is the media.

Even when courts make judgments and the government announces policies, it is ultimately the media that decides how they are conveyed to the public in terms of context and language.

As gray areas expanded, the media's responsibility should have become heavier.

However, the reality was the opposite.

Reporting that failed to clearly distinguish between facts, interpretations, and opinions, articles that fixated on outcomes rather than procedures, and headlines that prioritized sensationalism over verification have fueled social distrust. The media, which should have been mediating gray areas, has, in many respects, exacerbated and reproduced them.

Public broadcasting is a particularly serious area. Public broadcasters should ideally be key institutions for mediating gray areas and establishing social standards.

However, in reality, it has repeatedly been the case that some organizations and specific labor unions have seized de facto editorial control, forming a complex symbiotic relationship with political power.

As a result, public broadcasters often degenerate from mediators of interpretive conflict into another source of interpretive power.

This is not simply a matter of ideology, but a matter of governance. When editorial control is concentrated in specific groups and external checks and balances are weak, public broadcasters run a greater risk of becoming tools for interest groups rather than public goods.

When the institutions with the greatest interpretive power operate with the most fragile internal standards, social conflicts are structurally amplified.

The paradox of institutions meant to manage gray areas actually empowering them arises at this point.

Absence of Standards is the Absence of Human Rights

In a society where the standards for gray areas are unclear, it is not power, but people, who are first to be shaken.

The vaguer the yardstick for judgment, the more interpretation tends to favor the powerful, and the more opaque the procedures, the more easily the rights of the weak recede.

Institutions that shed accountability give rise to selective justice, and selective justice leads to inequality in human rights.

When different yardsticks are applied to the same facts depending on the person, laws and institutions become not safeguards, but another source of risk.

Neglecting gray areas is not maintaining neutrality. It is condoning the exercise of power by those who possess standards and pushing the most vulnerable out of protective measures.

Therefore, the task of creating standards is not simply administrative improvement, but fundamentally a task of protecting human rights.

What is Needed is 'Operating Rules'

It is an uncomfortable reality.

However, accepting this reality as it is would be another form of irresponsibility.

The more interpretations there are, the clearer the standards must be, and the wider the gray areas, the stronger the accountability for explanations must become. The more important procedures become, the stricter their transparency must be.

The task of modern society is not to change black and white into gray, but to organize that gray into explainable standards.

We must change direction, even now.

We need to establish minimum standards applicable to each field, institutionalize accountability for the explanation of decision-making processes, and streamline procedures for handling interpretive conflicts.

In particular, the media must establish clear internal standards to control its own interpretive power, and public broadcasters must implement structural checks to prevent editorial control from being monopolized by specific groups.

This is not a grand ideological movement, but a highly practical task of building social infrastructure.

Establishing operating rules for gray areas is a way to reduce the cost of conflict in modern society and, at the same time, a way to protect human rights.

Responsibly Operated Gray Areas

We no longer live in an age of black and white.

But we cannot remain in an age of formless grayness either.

What is needed now is one thing.

Not a society that acknowledges gray areas, but a society that responsibly operates them.

Reporter Kim Young