SEOUL — Once a week, the four men sit around in a rented studio, laughing, blurting occasional expletives and making fun of South Korea’s leader, President Lee Myung-bak. Then they post a recording of their talk online.
Their podcast is the most popular in South Korea, with each session logging as many as two million downloads.
The four men “dedicate” their show to Mr. Lee, or “His Highness.” But they call their talk show Naneun Ggomsuda, or “I’m a petty-minded creep,” borrowing a nickname Mr. Lee’s most vociferous critics apply to the president.
“We try to entertain people by raising all kinds of allegations against His Highness. We offer data to support them, but what really matters is our attitude,” said Kim Ou-joon, 43, the show’s leader. “We believe that His Highness’s conservative regime has intimidated people.”
“So,” Mr. Kim continued, “we tell our audience: ‘Let’s not be intimidated! Let’s say whatever we want, even if we’re thrown into jail tomorrow.”’
Holding signs that said, “Let’s not be intimidated!” young people packed a 1,600-seat auditorium in Seoul last Saturday when Mr. Kim and his three colleagues held their first offline “concert.” When the concert opened, the fans screamed, chanting their heroes’ names.
The men’s popularity provides the latest evidence of younger South Koreans’ political awakening amid the rising cost of living and shrinking job prospects and their distrust of Mr. Lee and the country’s conservative mainstream news media. In the Oct. 26 mayoral election in Seoul, the independent opposition candidate who won took in nearly three times as many votes from people in their 20s, 30s and 40s as the government-backed candidate, exit polls showed.
“They channel our anger at the government; it’s a catharsis,” You Hae-young, a 34-year-old fan, said of the show.
With his unruly mustache and wild hair, Mr. Kim has commanded a cult following since 1998, when he began Ddanzi Ilbo, a political parody Web site. His latest podcast production — known by its Korean acronym, Na-ggom-su — has made his team a force every political party must reckon with.
Leaders of both governing and opposition parties have been guests on the show. When two opposition candidates in the Seoul mayoral race came under pressure to consolidate their campaigns behind a single candidate, they fought it out on Na-ggom-su.
For their latest recording, the team invited Kim Yong-ok, a philosopher who called Mr. Lee “a tragedy for our nation” and South Korea “an effective colony of the United States.” The show replayed an audio clip in which the philosopher said he was “not convinced even 0.0001 percent” when the government announced last year that the sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors was caused by a North Korean torpedo attack.
Mr. Kim started Na-ggom-su in April.
The most talkative of his three partners is Chung Bong-ju, 51, a former lawmaker. He cuts off the others in midsentence and punctuates almost every statement with a laugh he himself calls “silly.” He confesses to having “the intelligence of an orangutan” and spending hours each day searching for his name on the Internet. He promotes himself as “a great politician with a beautiful soul and fatally attractive.” He mentions his soon-to-be-released book every chance he gets.
“I’m a clown,” he said during one of his rare serious comments. “I speak and act on people’s behalf.”
Often begging Mr. Chung to “shut up” is Choo Chin-woo, 38, an investigative journalist with the newsweekly SisaIN. His muckraking has driven his pet enemy, the country’s leading Protestant churches, to call him “Satan’s reporter.”
“These days, I am going after one man and one man only: His Highness,” he said in an interview.
Often caught dozing during the show is Kim Yong-min, 37, a former radio commentator. Schooled in a Christian seminary and nicknamed “the preacher’s fat son” — his father is a preacher — Mr. Kim sways his girth and belts out songs mocking Mr. Lee to the tunes of church hymns (the president is an elder at one of the major Protestant churches in Seoul).
Recently, the four men began acknowledging another regular: the aging air-conditioner in their studio that often kicks in with a loud wheezing noise, prompting Mr. Chung to shout: “Shut up, I’m talking!” The machine has its own fan Web site, as do the human hosts.
The four men meet about 10 minutes before their recording starts and proceed without a script. They raise sensational allegations against Mr. Lee and his aides but couch them in phrases like “It is possible to conjecture ... ,” “There is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest ... ” and their favorite: “Of course, we don’t believe that His Highness would have committed such a nefarious deed.”
But they pull no punches once they lock on a target.
Mr. Choo reported that Na Kyung-won, the governing party’s candidate in the Seoul mayoral race, frequented a luxury skin care clinic with an annual membership fee of 100 million won, or $90,000. Ms. Na admitted using the clinic but denied membership. Still, in an election in which the gap between rich and poor was an issue, Mr. Choo’s report proved explosive. Ms. Na has sued the program for libel, and the police are investigating.
Mr. Choo was also the first to report recently that Mr. Lee had bought an expensive piece of real estate in Seoul under his son’s name to build his retirement residence. During the concert, he also played what he said was a recording of a female Korean-American lawyer describing an extramarital affair with the president before his 2007 election.
Mr. Lee’s office confirmed the property purchase but denied it had involved any wrongdoing. Otherwise it declined to comment on Na-ggom-su or Mr. Choo’s reports. Hong Joon-pyo, chairman of Mr. Lee’s Grand National Party, who recently attended the show as a guest, said: “This is a necessary outlet for young people’s anger.”
Kim Sang-hyun, a journalism professor at Yonsei University, said the podcast’s success was also a reflection of a growing disenchantment with the country’s three most powerful newspapers, all of them conservative and accused of favoring Mr. Lee, as well as with the country’s two leading television networks, whose heads are effectively appointed by the government.
Its popularity also follows a stepped-up government effort to prosecute people for posting pro-North Korean and potentially libelous items on the Internet, a crackdown government critics say is aimed at intimidating them. A series of television and radio talk show hosts who have recently lost their jobs indicated that they were forced to resign under political pressure because of their criticism of the government. In its annual global freedom of the press index released in May, Freedom House demoted South Korea from “free” to “partly free.”
“Na-ggom-su scratches people’s back where it itches, talking about things they are curious about but can’t find in the mainstream media,” Professor Kim said.
Shin Chang-shik, a university student, said he liked Na-ggom-su because it addressed issues young people cared about, like tuition rising faster than inflation and the difficulty of finding a job.
“It’s about time we had a program satirizing politicians, especially the president, as the Americans do with their Saturday Night Live show,” said Chung Eun-joo, 34.
But Kim Jin-kook, the lead editorial writer at JoongAng Ilbo, one of the three conservative dailies Na-ggom-su criticizes, countered that the show “blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, commentary and comedy.”
“When we laugh at cynical parodies and mockeries of people at the top, politics turns ridiculous,” he wrote in a signed column.
Mr. Kim, the Na-ggom-su host, admitted that much of what his program said was “in a conjecture stage.”
“And yes, we are biased,” he said, with an expletive followed by a ringing laugh. “But there are so many things that the mainstream media think they have the power not to report, and I want to circulate them.”
