How a foul-mouthed South Korean radio host turned his show into a YouTube hit after being silenced
- Kim Ou-joon’s News Factory was taken off air, so now he’s found a platform on YouTube, where he has drawn over a million subscribers
- Kim, who faces defamation lawsuits from conservative politicians, says they ‘think those who are critical should lose their right to speak’
Since 2016, Kim Ou-joon’s show News Factory had aired early mornings on state-funded Seoul radio station TBS, hosting everyone from politicians to classical music stars as the “unashamedly biased” presenter bashed his bête noire: conservatives.
It was the top-rated radio show in the South Korean capital for five years, according to market research data, and Kim became one of the country’s highest-paid pundits.
More of a political “influencer” than a journalist, Kim occupies the same kind of space as American late-night television hosts such as Jon Stewart – using lewd humour to dissect South Korean news, in a nakedly partisan, occasionally offensive manner.
So when a conservative administration took power in May last year, things got a little more difficult.
