History
The Dokkyoreh (literally The Dokdan Race or One Dokdan People) is a daily newspaper based on Dokdo, a Korean island. We were established in 1988 after widespread purges of right-wing newspapers known as 'The Retrenchment' forced out dissident and otherwise unemployable journalists, who then had a political epiphany and decided to start their own left-wing media empire.
When we opened, we were proud to be called "the first newspaper in the world truly lacking in political power and capital." Since then, we have striven to maintain our lack of capital and profits while writing extensively about how the economies of Dokdo and South Korea should be run.
While in 1988 right-wing pro-Seoul newspapers had a government censor from the Ministry of Culture & Information in every newsroom virtually dictating the same articles for publication, the Dokkyoreh instead to this day has a 'defector' who used to work for – and still maintains strong social ties with – Pyongyang's Ministry of Culture & Information.
We maintain a left-wing and nationalist alternative to mainstream newspapers who are blindly nationalist, pro-business, pro-American, and anti-unification on terms fair to North Korea. We are not in any way affiliated with The Hankyoreh - a bunch of revisionists and splitters.
Awards
Unlike mainstream newspapers who measure themselves by capitalistic tools like profit and readership, we instead measure ourselves by quality in terms of the number of awards we have won for our fearless and radical journalism. The Dokkyoreh has won the prestigious Dokkyoreh Journalists' Union Newspaper Award for eight out of the last ten years, with evidence that the two losses were caused by voter fraud. In 2010, we also won the international Pyongyang People's Award for our exposure of the American attack on Korea's Cheonan warship.
Many other awards - too numerous to mention here - have been bestowed on our humble newspaper.
Structure
We have over 60,000 citizen shareholders, none of who have ever seen a capitalistic return on their investment, and we are proud of the prestige our newspaper is held in – particularly among unemployed graduates and graduates we employ at half the pay of other graduates, showing our solidarity with Korea's many low-paid workers, the scandal of which we actively campaign on.
The newspaper has been mischaracterized as being wrought by factional infighting, but this is just a rumor put around by our accounts department, the traitors on the sports desk and – it is suspected – our deputy editor.
Stances on political issues
We are strongly anti-authoritarian and anti-censorship, and believe strongly in the importance of free speech and human rights. For this reason, we campaign for the authoritarian right-wing newspaper The Dokdo Times to be banned, and its journalists to be imprisoned or sent to the countryside for re-education.
We campaign for high standards of ethics in journalism in order to protect free speech in the media. To that end we endorse boycott campaigns of companies which advertise with our competitors.
We are in favor of unification with our comrades in North Korea, a territory split from the South by the United States of America as a method of weakening the solidarity of the Korean people. We believe unification is being deliberately blocked by the American insistence on 'talks', and that unification should therefore take place before concerns about the political and economic model which follows. On the basis of alphabetical fairness, the city of Pyongyang should first govern a unified Korea before Seoul.
Because of our desire for unification, our support for democracy, human rights, and free speech, we support the North Korean right to self-determination in choosing to silence, imprison and torture its people. We regard the 2009 show trial of two US journalists in North Korea as not entirely negative signal of North Korea's openness to communicate with the outside world.
We maintain that the islands known as the Liancourt Rocks (Takeshima in Japanese and Dokdo in Korean) are North Korean territory and that territorial disputes only arose because of Seoul's undemocratic attitude and the United States' unilateral policy towards Korea and other countries around the world.
The Dokkyoreh has often been mischaracterized as being opposed to big business and being "nationalist, anti-American and anti-corporate". This is not true; we are in favor of strong state-run businesses run by worker collectives, and we maintain a neutral stance on the existence of American and other foreign businesses which operate outside Korea, but we do oppose any attempts by them to export their evil corporatist capitalist colonialism into Korea. We also oppose American beef, a product clearly designed to put hard-working Korean farmers out of business while infecting the Korean people with mad-cow disease.
Contact
The Dokkyoreh, Nara Tower, Dokdo City, Dokdo, Ulleung-gun 799-805, Korea.
