SKorea gives reporters the boot, critics cry foul

SEOUL, May 23 (Reuters) South Korea's government, which has charged the local media with colluding on stories, is planning to kick reporters out of most ministries and tear down their work spaces.

The government said its plan, rolled out this week, will modernise an outdated media structure, while critics today charged it harkened back to the bad old days of a generation ago when authoritarian rulers clamped down on press freedom.

''The policy ... is a step backward to the level of freedom of speech under the military and despotic regimes,'' the mainstream JoongAng Ilbo daily said in an editorial today.

The government said it planned to remove the press rooms at most ministries and police stations, consolidating all media contact to three centrally located briefing rooms. It would also restrict media access to government officials.

Most South Korean ministries have separate press rooms where domestic media station reporters throughout the day.

Ministries typically bar international media from being members of their press clubs and will expel them from certain government briefings.

President Roh Moo-hyun, whose support rate has wavered between 15 and 30 percent for several months, said at a cabinet meeting in January the press rooms ''are where a few reporters sit around'' and ''manufacture'' news stories.

His government argues most other major democracies have a permanent media presence only at a few key ministries and not at almost all agencies, as in South Korea.

A government official said the main purpose was not to block access, but the reverse, and make it far more equitable among different media, both domestic and foreign.

Leading South Korean conservative and liberal politicians denounced the plan, saying it was an ill-advised measure from an unpopular president who will leave office in less than a year.

The new regulations will likely cut the access journalists have to government officials and limit the amount of information available to the public, academics said.

''It is an outrage,'' said journalism professor Son Tae-gyu of Dankook University in Seoul, ''something only a person with no philosophical understanding of the freedom of the press is capable of.'' REUTERS RL BD1505