Lee Kangtaik

Until recently Kangtaik ran TBS in South Korea as CEO. He is also the chairman of the Korea Broadcasting Channel Promotion Association which is the operators’ association in Korea for IPTV and cable TV. TBS is a public TV and radio broadcaster and is the second most popular radio station in the Seoul metropolitan region. One of its current affairs programs called ‘News Factory’ has been the most popular radio program in South Korea since 2018.

Kangtaik has been working in Journalism for over 20 years. Before his time at TBS he worked as a TV producer for KBS (South Korea’s leading public broadcaster), where he produced various current affairs shows and history documentaries while he was also actively involved in theoretical research on journalism and various broadcasting policies as the head of the Broadcasting Culture Research Institute. He’s also been giving lectures to university students and the general public in various settings.

He also tried to defend freedom of the media and pro-democracy media as union leader when the freedom of speech in the South Korean media was being questioned. Between 2011-2012, he led a long-term joint strike in the media industry in South Korea.

Kangtaik is most passionate about the public nature in media. He has great interest in the future of the public broadcasting, the journalism theory and rebuilding public consensus in the post-truth era. Additionally, he wishes to contribute to the promotion of understanding and exchanges between the British and Korean media.

While at the Reuters Institute he will look at reformation of public broadcasting in the new media environment, and public communication in the so-called post-truth era.