February 10th, 2017:  I remember this bittersweet day vividly. I, along with the rest of the Saint Paul Preparatory Seoul Boys’ basketball team members, was at KIS Jeju for a two day interscholastic basketball tournament. We were delighted on the first day of the tournament, as the team ranked first in the preliminary rounds even with only seven able bodies on the team. This was the sweet part of the trip.

We travelled back to our hotel rooms that evening to wash up and gather in my room to watch a new talent audition program, ‘Teenage Rappers’ (고등래퍼). We were wildly excited to witness this broadcast, since my close school friend and former basketball teammate, Jang Yong Joon, was scheduled to appear.

 

The team was glued to the hotel television and closely watched for signs of Yong Joon.

In the first half of the show, we saw flashes of him, but the camera was moving too fast to lock our eyes on him.  Just as I was starting to get worried, Yong Joon’s part came up; he was interviewed briefly and then proceeded to rap. Just as I had expected, he killed it on the stage. The judges in the show extolled him for his talent, as did thousands and thousands of people on the internet. In less than thirty minutes after the show ended, Yong Joon had become an overnight sensation, an instant icon. His unorthodox flows of rapping and relaxed tone were a pure novelty to South Korean fans, and they loved him for it.

However, another thirty minutes later, Yong Joon’s private life and past mistakes had been exposed on the web by anonymous individuals who had been waiting for Yong Joon to surface just so that they could bring him down for his past. Yong Joon quickly admitted to his indiscretions and officially withdrew from Teenage Rappers.

 

Countless journalists jumped on the bandwagon to report Yong Joon’s story. It was too sensational not to be talked about: a teenage rapper is raised by a female broadcaster and a congressman and attends a private school that costs over $60,000 in tuition. Soon various publishing companies were citing anonymous tips as credible sources in the Yong Joon story, and as a result created a haze of misinformation (even mistaking our school for the St. Paul’s in New Hampshire).

The news tapped into the anger of South Korean citizens, and the witch-hunting had begun. After the incident, Yong Joon left social media and went into hiding, even from me. When I finally did get in touch after four long days, the first thing he said was: “I am sorry. I am sorry for being this horrible person and a horrible friend.”

This article is not intended to defend Yong Joon, nor exculpate him from his mistakes. As a student of Saint Paul, I write solely to ‘report’ the yellow journalism that sabotaged a teenager’s personal life and hopes. While he was at fault for irresponsible conduct on the internet and at school, the journalists should focus on factual, not sensational, journalism. By the way, our school’s tuition fee is nowhere near $60,000.

 

 

Seungjin Jordan Choi

Grade 11

Saint Paul Preparatory School