[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And, you know, here we are in this moment where we're about to get started with another election cycle.

ROBERT: Another Iowa, another New Hampshire, Carolinas.

JAD: All of that.

ROBERT: And this is the time when we reporters decide well, we're gonna have to tell you some stuff, and you're gonna have to decide what matters to you.

JAD: And the story that we're gonna tell in this podcast is about a moment, a shockingly recent moment, that's how I felt when I first heard this story. A moment of when what reporters decide to tell and what people decide to value really changed.

ROBERT: So we're gonna take you back to an evening in 1987. Tom Fiedler, ace political reporter for the Miami Herald. It's late at night and he's in his office.

TOM FIEDLER: I'm at my desk. I'm just, in fact, packing up to go home. My phone rang, and I'm thinking, "Oh, that's probably my wife, and she's wondering why I haven't left yet." Said, "All right, I'll pick it up."

ROBERT: But when he picked up the phone ...

TOM FIEDLER: Turned out this ...

ROBERT: It turned out it was not a voice he recognized. It was a woman's voice, maybe in her late 20s. And she said to him, "I have something you need to know." It was a tip about one of the most powerful and charismatic men in American politics, former Senator Gary Hart, who at the time was not only the most likely candidate to become the Democratic nominee, he was very possibly gonna be the next President of the United States.

TOM FIEDLER: And her words to me were, "Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends."

ROBERT: And she told him, basically, "I can prove it."

TOM FIEDLER: And, you know, I was rather, I guess, dumbstruck by that.

ROBERT: And he thought ...

TOM FIEDLER: Well, now what do we do?

JAD: Now, if you're of a certain age, you probably remember this story, but even if you've never heard of Gary Hart, you still probably know the outline of this story, the accusations, then the denial.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that woman.]

JAD: And then after that, the whole wall-to-wall media thing, which just goes on and on and on until you want to take your head off your shoulders, put it on the sidewalk and beat it with a baseball bat.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: But the thing that's easy to forget is that it wasn't always like this.

MATT BAI: No. Hart was the first to walk into this vortex of social forces.

ROBERT: That, by the way, is Matt Bai.

MATT BAI: National political columnist for Yahoo News.

ROBERT: He wrote a book about this incident which he called All the Truth Is Out.

JAD: And in that book, he makes the argument that this is the moment, Gary Hart, 1987, when political journalism slid off the rails. Or, you might argue, finally got serious.

MATT BAI: Well, you know, just flashback a minute because I think the context is important.

ROBERT: 1984.

MATT BAI: Hart kind of comes from nowhere.

[NEWS CLIP: It's a whole new ballgame in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.]

MATT BAI: Runs for president. Storms New Hampshire.

[NEWS CLIP: Senator Gary Hart is on his way to a clear-cut victory over Walter Mondale.]

MATT BAI: Beats Mondale there and becomes a political celebrity.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: This country cannot stand four more years of Reaganomics for the rich.]

[cheers]

JAD: Hart was this tall, good-looking Democrat.

MATT BAI: He's got great, wavy hair.

LESLEY STAHL: I mean, dashing, handsome, charismatic and young.

ROBERT: This is Lesley Stahl.

LESLEY STAHL: CBS.

ROBERT: She's covered politics for 40 years now. Works for 60 Minutes.

LESLEY STAHL: He was cool and smart. Women liked him, too.

MATT BAI: He's an anti-orthodox Democrat, very liberal, anti nukes. He is sort of the Bill Clinton before Bill Clinton.

ROBERT: He doesn't get the Democratic nomination in 1984. Walter Mondale does by a nose. But ...

JAD: Fast forward to 1987.

[NEWS CLIP: Like it or not, Campaign '88 is underway.]

MATT BAI: And ...

[NEWS CLIP: The leading contender, frontrunner Gary Hart, in New Hampshire.]

MATT BAI: ... he's winning.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: On to the White House!]

MATT BAI: He's running double digits higher than any Democrat.

ROBERT: And he's projected to beat George Bush, the Republican front runner.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The next President of the United States, Gary Hart.]

KEVIN SWEENEY: It felt like look, this is a guy who is changing politics, who is unafraid to speak the truth.

JAD: That's Kevin Sweeney. He was Hart's press secretary in 1987. He joined the campaign just a few years out of college.

KEVIN SWEENEY: I knew pretty early I wanted to work for Hart.

ROBERT: Do you remember why?

KEVIN SWEENEY: He was really liberal on social issues at the time. Unafraid to be specific or take a stand.

JAD: He said Hart placed an extraordinary amount of emphasis on not just winning the campaign, but what would they do when they got in office. So they wrote out all these position papers on foreign policy, energy, international trade, the budget.

KEVIN SWEENEY: There was something about Hart, and something about what happened on the campaign where it did feel like the kind of campaign that I haven't seen since.

ROBERT: And when does the subject of what goes on below the belt come up, if at all?

KEVIN SWEENEY: Well, there were rumors, definitely rumors.

MATT BAI: By this time, there are a lot of whispers about his personal life and a lot of speculation. He's been married to his college sweetheart, Lee, for a very long time. They've been separated twice, long separations. And during those separations, he's dated openly in Washington. So it's a well-known fact of life that he's dated. Nobody wrote about that.

JAD: And the reason they didn't write about it was because of a very old, very well-established convention.

MATT BAI: I mean look, go back through the 20th century. Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, you know, towering figures. Their personal lives simply were not in play.

JAD: Take, for example, JFK. Lesley Stahl says that when the press was covering him ...

LESLEY STAHL: Vast numbers of reporters knew that John Kennedy was cheating on his wife, but we wouldn't have dreamed of printing that.

MATT BAI: I think the feeling was that, so what? You know, we all get to have a zone of privacy.

JAD: And the assumption was that what happened in your private zone behind closed doors ...

LESLEY STAHL: Had nothing to do with whether you were gonna be a good president or not.

MATT BAI: This is the world that Hart still thinks he's living in, that as long as it doesn't burst into public view, it won't be a story.

JAD: But Matt Bai says that world was actually changing because of a political earthquake that had happened just over a decade before.

[NEWS CLIP: Talking about the Watergate break in.]

[NEWS CLIP: Burglarizing and bugging Democratic headquarters in Washington.]

MATT BAI: That is the big first knocked-out brick in that wall.

[NEWS CLIP: Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee.]

JAD: You know, arguably the biggest scandal in White House history. You had Nixon tapping phone lines, compiling enemy lists. And for the reporters covering Nixon ...

MATT BAI: It really is an embarrassment. You had an entire White House press corps who had followed this man, Richard Nixon, for decades, and somehow either missed the fact or failed to report the fact that he had some significant psychological issues and could be corrupted.

LESLEY STAHL: I think there was a sense that we let the public down.

ROBERT: Lesley Stahl remembers it this way.

LESLEY STAHL: The regular White House press reporters, they should have been digging. They should have been looking behind the curtain. And so right after Watergate, reporters became tougher, saying, "Okay, we have to be skeptical about everything."

ROBERT: And in particular ...

LESLEY STAHL: The character issue.

MATT BAI: Meaning suddenly your makeup, your personal behavior, who you are in your private moments, matters a whole hell of a lot for the kind of president you can be, and whether or not we can trust you as a public leader.

[NEWS CLIP: Hart's character is the subject tonight of our Weekend Journal. In this day and age, candidates' personal lives are getting a great deal of scrutiny.]

KEVIN SWEENEY: I remember there was a bit of a shift in the kinds of reporters who were covering national politics. They had a different orientation, and they were really interested in the character question.

ROBERT: That's Kevin Sweeney again. He says he was initially frustrated by the reporters' strange obsession with things that were not really issues, important issues in the campaign.

KEVIN SWEENEY: Like age. There was some confusion about Hart's age. The fact that he changed the family name. His signature changed at a certain point in his life.

ROBERT: He says when those stories initially popped up ...

KEVIN SWEENEY: I thought it was a false set of issues. I didn't really take it seriously.

JAD: But then when it came to the rumors of marital infidelity, he felt like he needed to talk to Gary Hart.

KEVIN SWEENEY: Yeah. I did say, "If anything is happening, it needs to stop. I mean, this can't—whatever it is. I mean—" and he said, "You know, nothing is happening." And he shot back and said, "They have no right to cover that. That's ridiculous. It's not an issue that—you know, why is that an issue? That's not their job." And I kept pushing back saying, "I don't actually care what their job is. I don't care what you think their job is. This is the new context that exists now. The rules have changed."

TOM FIEDLER: So, you know, it was ...

ROBERT: This brings us back to Tom Fiedler of the Miami Herald. He was covering Gary Hart, going with him to all the stops in Iowa, New Hampshire ...

TOM FIEDLER: And so forth. And it seemed like at every stop along the way, someone, some reporter would raise her or his hand and would say what about the rumors of his womanizing?

ROBERT: So on April 27, 1987, he wrote a column asking the question ...

TOM FIEDLER: Is it ethical for journalists to be even raising this kind of a question? And I really came down to the conclusion that unless the media, unless the reporters involved had actual proof that this was a problem, that he was a womanizer, we just shouldn't be printing that.

ROBERT: Column runs on a Monday morning.

JAD: That night ...

MATT BAI: He gets the call.

TOM FIEDLER: The voice on the other side says, "Gary Hart is having an affair with one of my best friends."

JAD: He was dumbstruck, as we know.

TOM FIEDLER: I told her that my position had to be that I couldn't believe what she had to say unless there was proof. And finally she said "My friend is going to fly up to Washington next weekend, and she's going to spend the weekend with Senator Hart." She said, "So all you have to do is buy a ticket on that plane." And I thought, "Well, what is inbounds and what is out of bounds?"

ROBERT: But Fiedler thought, "Well, no, no, no. This is inbounds."

TOM FIEDLER: So my view at that point was if in fact there was proof that he was carrying on an affair privately while publicly insisting that there really was no basis to this, then that was a relevant issue.

ROBERT: Relevant to his performance as a future president?

TOM FIEDLER: Yes. It was a question of integrity. So we thought the only way that we are going to find out if what the caller told us is true is we've got to catch him.

ROBERT: So his editor tells a colleague of his, Jim McGee, to go to the airport, telling him ...

TOM FIEDLER: "This is what you're going to do. You're gonna look for a woman who looks like a model."

JAD: That's how the woman on the phone described her friend.

TOM FIEDLER: She's described as a model, blond, in her mid 20s. "And call me back if you see it."

MATT BAI: So this guy Jim races to the airport, spots this attractive young woman, fits the description.

TOM FIEDLER: Of course, we later knew was Donna Rice.

ROBERT: So he boards the plane, they land in DC. He follows her out of the airport to a cab.

TOM FIEDLER: He runs to another cab, jumps in it, and he says, "Follow that cab."

JAD: Just like in the movies.

TOM FIEDLER: Which they do. [laughs]

ROBERT: He loses her for a while, but then eventually he gets to the house where he thinks Hart and this lady should be.

TOM FIEDLER: And he's not there more than a few minutes when the front door opens, and out comes the young woman on the arm of a very handsome man. One small problem. Jim had never met Gary Hart.

JAD: He had no idea what Gary Hart looked like.

ROBERT: No! [laughs]

TOM FIEDLER: He said later—he said, "I really couldn't pick Gary Hart out of a lineup." That's when I really thought we have got to go to Washington.

MATT BAI: And that's what they do. The Herald ...

ROBERT: Matt Bai again.

MATT BAI: ... they send a team of reporters, investigative reporters, and Feidler and a photographer to Washington.

TOM FIEDLER: We arrive Saturday morning.

MATT BAI: They stake out his townhouse.

TOM FIEDLER: You know, I'm thinking, "My gosh, somebody will surely notice that there are four or five of us—lurking is probably the right word.

MATT BAI: It's May, and one guy's in a parka to disguise himself. And Fiedler, who the candidate knows, is in a jogging suit, and he's pretending to jog around the street all day long.

ROBERT: [laughs]

TOM FIEDLER: I would change clothes a little bit. Occasionally I would run without the jacket. Other times, I would just be wearing a t-shirt and shorts.

ROBERT: And he'd run around and around and around.

MATT BAI: It's not how the CIA would do it, but it's about what you'd expect from a newspaper.

TOM FIEDLER: Our quote-unquote "stakeout" went on all day into Saturday night, and it got dark. And then front door opens.

MATT BAI: Hart walks out with Donna Rice, sort of arm in arm.

TOM FIEDLER: He quickly realizes something is wrong.

MATT BAI: He kind of makes the surveillance. They see him. He sees them. He turns her back around. They go inside.

TOM FIEDLER: Go back inside the townhouse.

MATT BAI: He sends her away through the back door.

TOM FIEDLER: And then he comes back out of the townhouse ...

ROBERT: Hops in his car ...

TOM FIEDLER: ... and starts to drive off. So our photographer starts to chase Senator Hart's car.

MATT BAI: He drives a couple blocks ...

TOM FIEDLER: Up streets, down streets, back and forth.

ROBERT: He gets out of the car.

TOM FIEDLER: Walks through a park.

ROBERT: Chase continues on foot.

MATT BAI: He knows they're following him, and they know he knows they're following him.

ROBERT: Hart ducks around the corner. They lose him for a second, then they're running to catch up.

MATT BAI: And then ...

TOM FIEDLER: They turn a corner in an alley. And there's Hart. There is the presumed nominee of the Democratic Party, the most important Democratic politician in the country. And they're confronting each other.

JAD: And for a moment, standing in the alleyway behind Hart's townhouse, they just stare at each other because there is no script for this moment.

TOM FIEDLER: Ultimately, he asked, "Well, who are you?" "Well, we're from the Miami Herald." And he didn't really say anything. So I told him that we wanted to know why he was meeting with this woman in his townhouse, a woman who at that point we knew had spent the night with him.

MATT BAI: He says, in myriad ways, myriad times ...

TOM FIEDLER: "I'm not gonna tell you who that woman was. This is private. This isn't public."

MATT BAI: But he says there's no affair, which he would maintain forever after. And ultimately ...

TOM FIEDLER: He said, "I've said enough." And he turned and walked inside and slammed the door. We did tell him, though. We said, "We're gonna write this story unless you give us a reason as to why what we are seeing and what we're concluding is wrong." And he never did that. So we kind of look at ourselves and say, "Well, now what do we do? Ultimately, the call was we have the proof we feel we needed. We know that publicly he was saying these things, and we now know that privately he was engaged in this.

ROBERT: So they ran back to the hotel room. Fiedler frantically typed out the story.

TOM FIEDLER: "Gary Hart, whose presidential campaign has been dogged by rumors of womanizing, spent Friday night and much of Saturday with a woman who came from Miami to meet him."

ROBERT: The only thing that gives me pause is under this standard, you'd lose Jack Kennedy, certainly.

TOM FIEDLER: Yeah.

ROBERT: You'd lose Woodrow Wilson, I think. So ...

TOM FIEDLER: But, you know, you've leaped to the conclusion that the public would banish a person for that. And I don't go there.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAMIE YORK: So are you worried about how it's gonna land?

JAD: That's our producer, Jamie York.

TOM FIEDLER: Terrified.

ROBERT: And the next morning ...

[NEWS CLIP: An ABC News brief.]

TOM FIEDLER: The political world explodes.

[NEWS CLIP: Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart.]

[NEWS CLIP: Gary Hart.]

[NEWS CLIP: Gary Hart.]

TOM FIEDLER: It truly became a firestorm.

[NEWS CLIP: The Miami Herald reports today that Hart quote, "Spent Friday night and most of Saturday ...]

[NEWS CLIP: The Miami Herald reports that Hart and a Miami woman spent Friday night alone together.]

[NEWS CLIP: In his Washington townhouse with a young woman.]

MATT BAI: That story begins ricocheting around the country.

[NEWS CLIP: On CNN.]

MATT BAI: So by Sunday ...

[NEWS CLIP: Confronted by Herald reporters last night ...]

[NEWS CLIP: Hart denied any impropriety.]

[NEWS CLIP: ... Hart denied any impropriety.]

MATT BAI: It's very apparent that not only is Hart in trouble, but the entire culture of media around politics has changed in some very dramatic way.

ROBERT: And when you think about the mindset of the television people, the radio people, the newspaper people, is there any self doubt there? Is there people saying, "Is this really a question of his ability to conduct matters of state?" Is that question being asked?

MATT BAI: There's a tremendous amount of self doubt.

[NEWS CLIP: Not everyone agrees that such intense public scrutiny is necessary.]

MATT BAI: There was widespread feeling ...

[NEWS CLIP: The Miami Herald was put on the defensive.]

MATT BAI: ... that what Fiedler and his colleagues had done was wrong.

LESLEY STAHL: You know, that's out of bounds.

[NEWS CLIP: What business is it of the press?]

MATT BAI: You staked out a guy in his home.

LESLEY STAHL: What are they up to, sneaking around in the bushes and all that?

[NEWS CLIP: A lot of reporters don't think it's relevant. And one reason is this: nobody knows where this is gonna lead.]

[NEWS CLIP: Does this set a precedent?

[NEWS CLIP: Should reporters be staking out George Bush's house? Bruce Babbitt's house? Joe Biden's house?]

MATT BAI: But then in the same breath, there's generally this sense of but, you know ...

[NEWS CLIP: All he had to do, basically, was stay clean.]

MATT BAI: ... what was he thinking?

[NEWS CLIP: Hart is to blame.]

[NEWS CLIP: It's Gary Hart's fault.]

MATT BAI: And didn't he understand that things had changed? And doesn't the public maybe have a right to know?

[NEWS CLIP: And so the newspaper that began the controversy is not backing down.]

MATT BAI: So there was a real conflict. All the various echelon of media respond to this differently.

TOM FIEDLER: The New York Times refuses to touch it. Originally, the Washington Post is deeply conflicted.

ROBERT: And as for the public ...

[NEWS CLIP: In an unscientific Herald telephone poll, 63 percent of the callers said they thought the paper was making too much of a fuss over Gary Hart.]

MATT BAI: I mean, the polling shows that people think the media overstepped. He's still polling very strongly. He's winning in the public mind.

ROBERT: According to Lesley Stahl, most people seem to be willing to compartmentalize.

LESLEY STAHL: Most people can split off how's he gonna be as President and, you know, is he cheating on his wife?

ROBERT: So Hart and his team try to get ahead of this story. They schedule a press conference in New Hampshire. And on the flight over, Kevin Sweeney, his press secretary, preps him.

KEVIN SWEENEY: I remember asking Hart a question, something like, "Have you ever been unfaithful to your wife?" And he shot back at me with anger. He said, "I don't have to answer that question. That's a question that I can answer to God, to my wife, but it's not a question that I need to answer in politics. That's a dangerous question to be asking. We don't want to go there." And I just said, "That's a great answer. Just hold that anger. That's an appropriate response.

[NEWS CLIP: Senator Hart. Senator Hart.]

KEVIN SWEENEY: We get to the press conference.

[NEWS CLIP: Senator Hart, Senator Hart, there is a new poll.]

KEVIN SWEENEY: There are lights everywhere. The room is filled.

MATT BAI: Sweaty. It's hot. There's more media than anyone's ever seen packed in.

KEVIN SWEENEY: It's a really intense environment.

MATT BAI: Hart has very little buffer, and he's handling the questions ...

[NEWS CLIP: How are you going to convince them that you're not gonna make this kind of mistake in judgment about personal behavior again?]

MATT BAI: ... really pretty brilliantly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: I won't tell them. I'll demonstrate it. As time goes on, people are gonna want to know about your judgment, your character on the issues that affect their lives and their families and their nation. That's what this campaign is going to be about.]

MATT BAI: He's kind of firing on all cylinders.

KEVIN SWEENEY: And Hart goes through, you know, 30 minutes, 40 minutes of questions. And then ...

[NEWS CLIP: You raised in your remarks yesterday, you raised the issue of morality and you raised the issue of truthfulness.]

MATT BAI: At some point, he calls on a young reporter named Paul Taylor.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Taylor: Very specific. And I have a series of questions about it.]

MATT BAI: And Paul Taylor walks him through a series of questions.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Taylor: You said you did nothing immoral. Did you mean that you had no sexual relationship with Donna Rice last weekend or any other time you were with her?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: That is correct. That is correct.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Taylor: Do you believe that adultery is immoral?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Taylor: Have you ever committed adultery?]

MATT BAI: He says, "Senator, have you ever committed adultery?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: Um ...]

MATT BAI: No politician had ever publicly been asked that broad, direct question about his personal behavior. It really just shocked the room.

JAD: We don't know what Gary Hart was thinking in that moment. He did not want to be interviewed on tape. But it's clear that if he said yes or no to that broad of a question, then his entire married life—because have you ever committed adultery? That word 'ever.' His entire married life would suddenly be in play.

MATT BAI: And ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: Um ...]

MATT BAI: ... Hart stumbled around for a minute. And ultimately he says ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: I do not have to answer this question.]

KEVIN SWEENEY: "I don't have to answer that question."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Taylor: It was introduced by you, Mr. Hart.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: That's right.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Paul Taylor: And I think ...]

KEVIN SWEENEY: When I heard that response, I felt it. It felt like defeat. And I was offended. I really, in that moment thought, this is just wrong. This has nothing to do with what is necessary to run this country. And I just thought, this is not—we're not gonna survive.

MATT BAI: And that moment effectively does him in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: I have told you the facts. If you don't believe me. There's nothing I can do about it.]

[NEWS CLIP: Senator Hart ...]

[NEWS CLIP: Gary Hart is finished as a presidential candidate.]

[NEWS CLIP: Gary Hart's formal campaign is only three weeks old.]

[NEWS CLIP: There was simply no putting the genie back in the bottle.]

[NEWS CLIP: His appearances yesterday were mobs.]

[NEWS CLIP: The Hart campaign has been hammered to its knees.]

[NEWS CLIP: Asking the same questions again and again.]

[NEWS CLIP: Today, after what may be remembered as the most disastrous week any presidential candidate's endured in years. Hart told an aide, "Let's go home."]

JAD: Now according to Matt Bai, you can look at this whole story—and particularly Tom Fiedler taking that call and Paul Taylor asking that question—as this moment when all of these forces way outside of Gary Hart's control come together not just to sink his campaign but to change political journalism profoundly. But just for a gut check, we put the whole story ...

COKIE ROBERTS: We're talking about Tom Fiedler?

ROBERT: Yeah, Tom.

COKIE ROBERTS: Yeah.

JAD: ... in front of this lady.

COKIE ROBERTS: I'm Cokie Roberts.

ROBERT: But no, who you are, like, part two.

COKIE ROBERTS: [laughs] I'm a political commentator and author.

ROBERT: Okay.

ROBERT: Cokie Roberts believes that yeah, reporters were interested in character more after Watergate, but it wasn't just that.

COKIE ROBERTS: The thing that's important to keep in mind here is that there were many more women covering candidates at that point than there had been before. There were women on the bus.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

COKIE ROBERTS: And in the case of Gary Hart, several of those women had had personal encounters with him. So this was not somebody that women who were covering campaigns were ignorant of. And the other thing to keep in mind Robert, is that the whole women's movement did talk quite a bit about the personal is political. And because the way women were treated was something that we thought—and I continue to think—is a good gauge of character. And there was something of a sense that he treated women like Kleenex. So we were expanding the universe of what was a major character flaw.

JAMIE: So then are you kind of rooting Fiedler on?

COKIE ROBERTS: Oh, absolutely. Finally, somebody's written about it, and thank God it's a guy.

JAMIE: But as much as you were cheering them on, was there any concern that that was changing the rules of journalism?

COKIE ROBERTS: No.

JAMIE: Why?

COKIE ROBERTS: Because the rules of journalism were constantly changing, as they should.

JAD: And according to Cokie Roberts, this was less about journalism changing than about journalism catching up with the ethics of the time.

COKIE ROBERTS: Look, we elect our presidents based on who they are, not on what policies they stand for. It's different from any other office. The voters need to know as much as they can humanly know about that person.

JAMIE: So is there a line for you? Is there a place you won't go in taking the full measure of a candidate?

COKIE ROBERTS: Not for president that I can think of.

JAMIE: Hmm. There's nothing you wouldn't touch?

COKIE ROBERTS: No. I mean, I'd have to know that it was true.

JAMIE: Sure.

COKIE ROBERTS: But no. No.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: I had intended, quite frankly, to come down here this morning and read a short, carefully-worded political statement.]

ROBERT: This is Gary Hart's statement a few days after that press conference.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: Saying that I was withdrawing from the race, and then quietly disappear from the stage. And then after frankly tossing and turning all night, I said to myself, "Hell no.]

[cheers]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gary Hart: I'm not gonna do that because it's not my style and because I'm a proud man and I'm proud of what I've accomplished. In public life, some things may be interesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're important. We're all gonna have to seriously question a system for selecting our national leaders that reduces the press of this nation to hunters and presidential candidates to being hunted. Politics in this country—take it from me—is on the verge of becoming another form of athletic competition or sporting match. We all better do something to make this system work or we're all gonna be soon rephrasing Jefferson to say, "I tremble for my country when I think we may, in fact, get the kind of leaders we deserve."]

ROBERT: Now we did reach out to Mr. Hart for comment, explaining to him the story we were doing. And he wrote back this response. "Thank you for your letter and the invitation to participate in your current story. Though I did not become President, my life continues to be extraordinarily rich. Perhaps someday someone will tell that story. But for now, I have no interest in revisiting what many consider a turning point for the nation and a few an injustice. I do believe that the full and accurate story of that event remains to be told. Signed, Gary Hart."

JAD: Very special thanks to Jamie York, our Jamie York. And to Joe Trippie and to Matt Bai. You can find a link to Matt Bai's book, All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: This piece was produced by Simon Adler. And I guess that's pretty much it.

JAD: Coming up, we're gonna move from politics ...

ROBERT: To pop.

JAD: ... to pop. Yeah.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: And we are now going to, as promised, jump across the ocean and ask the same question: when reporters write stories, we have to figure out, well, what do you want to know? You have to ...

JAD: Yeah. How much do you want to know? And you have to answer that when you pick up the paper or turn on the radio. But now the context is not politics anymore.

ROBERT: No. Now it's music.

JAD: Yeah! And to help us with that, is reporter Alex Lee Young. Ready?

ALEXANDRA LEE YOUNG: I'm ready.

JAD: Where should we begin?

ALEXANDRA: Well, we're gonna start with this woman.

SARAH WOLFGANG: When I tell my friends about it, I kind of describe it as a prison but it's a prison you decide to walk into.

ALEXANDRA: Okay, so this—this is Sarah Wolfgang.

SARAH WOLFGANG: I was a former trainee for a K-Pop group in Korea [laughs].

ALEXANDRA: Sarah is Korean American. She was born in America.

SARAH WOLFGANG: But I actually grew up in Korea. My parents both worked for the military.

ALEXANDRA: And you were living in Seoul?

SARAH WOLFGANG: Correct.

ALEXANDRA: Okay.

SARAH WOLFGANG: And when I was in high school ...

ALEXANDRA: About 15 years old.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Maybe 10th grade.

ALEXANDRA: Her headshots ended up getting passed to a South Korean record company.

SARAH WOLFGANG: And when we received the phone call, they were like, "Oh, hey you want to come in and audition for a K-Pop group?" So I went in and then they were like, "Okay." They put me in front of a camera and they were—they asked me to sing. And I'm not the best singer.

ALEXANDRA: [laughs] But that doesn't seem to matter to K-Pop.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Nope! [laughs] Everything, you know, can be touched up.

ALEXANDRA: To make a long story short, they end up offering her a contract.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Of more than five years.

ALEXANDRA: And as part of that contract ...

SARAH WOLFGANG: We were asked to move into the dorms.

JAD: The what?

ALEXANDRA: They are these facilities that all the agencies have for their idols in-training.

SARAH WOLFGANG: They described it like a boarding school. And so I moved into the dorms with six or seven other girls.

ALEXANDRA: And it was here that Sarah says the company basically kept them under lock and key.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Well, they didn't lock us in there, but we weren't allowed to leave.

JAD: Wait, why is she doing this again?

ALEXANDRA: Well, let me explain to you guys just, like, how phenomenally huge K-Pop is.

JAD: Okay.

ALEXANDRA: K-Pop actually started in Korea in the early '90s but, like, in the last five or so years, it has just spilled out into the rest of the world. And by some estimates it was generating, like, around $5-billion a year.

JAD: Wow!

ALEXANDRA: And nearly all of this is based on a kind of fantasy.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Because K-Pop stars are, you know, products of fantasy world.

ALEXANDRA: That's Professor Suk-Young Kim.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Theater Studies at University of California-Santa Barbara. You know, stars they have to have just surreally beautiful face, beautiful body. You know, excessively long legs, round eyes, pale skin, flowing hair. They're not a creature of this world. They shouldn't be, you know? They can only exist in fantasy world.

ALEXANDRA: And that fantasy, that's what they're trying to manufacture in those dorms.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Like, they wanted us to lose weight. So we would wake up at, like, 4:00 or 5:00 am in the morning and then go hiking.

ALEXANDRA: Sarah says after the hike they'd come back, eat breakfast.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Which usually consisted of lettuce.

ALEXANDRA: Then they'd have dance classes, singing classes.

SARAH WOLFGANG: And then we have lessons of—I think they're called, like, humble lessons.

ALEXANDRA: Where basically this guy would show up to the dorm.

SARAH WOLFGANG: And he would teach us to bow correctly. So, like, we would have to bow in unison so that we seemed as, like, one big happy group.

ALEXANDRA: They weren't allowed to have cellphones.

SARAH WOLFGANG: No.

ALEXANDRA: Computers.

SARAH WOLFGANG: Nope.

ALEXANDRA: Or a relationship of any kind.

SARAH WOLFGANG: All companies pretty much don't want you to be in a relationship.

ALEXANDRA: And in fact, Suk-Young told me that in 2011 ...

SUK-YOUNG KIM: That one of the members of 2NE1, which is a girl group managed by YG Entertainment revealed that their management said they should not be dating before age 29.

JAD: What?

SUK-YOUNG KIM: They shouldn't be dating because stars belong to the public, to the fans.

ALEXANDRA: And that was the thing. It was like a purity thing.

AJ PARK: You know, that pure angelic virgin Madonna image.

ALEXANDRA: This by the way, is K-Pop writer AJ Park.

AJ PARK: Editor-at-large at Soompi.com. Like, girl groups, they used to call them, like, nation's fairies. You know, they had this pure chaste image to them. And the boy bands, too. Because that—being single makes them more marketable and appealing.

ALEXANDRA: The founders of K-pop knew back in the early '90s that the fans would love the stars even more if the stars weren't just beautiful and perfect, but they also seemed somehow available.

JAD: Wait, wait, wait. Is that all that different than America? I mean, American celebrity culture has fantasy woven in too.

ROBERT: Of course. Of course it does.

ALEXANDRA: Yeah, but there's a big difference.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: In Korea, that fantasy world, it is so extremely controlled.

ALEXANDRA: Way more than in America, according to Suk-Young Kim. And it's controlled not just by the agencies.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: But by the fans to the extent that it defies all of our common sense.

ROBERT: What do you mean?

ALEXANDRA: I'll give you an example. This one I heard from Professor Suk-Young Kim and also writer Leslie Tumbaco.

LESLIE TUMBACO: I'm the editor-in-chief of Seoulbeats.

ALEXANDRA: It's a big K-Pop/K-Entertainment site. Okay, 2008 there was this new girl group.

LESLIE TUMBACO: Girls' Generation.

ALEXANDRA: Called Girls' Generation.

LESLIE TUMBACO: Girls' Generation was a nine-member all-girls group. That was, like, appearing on, like, music shows and, like, variety shows. Being promoted as, like, the girl next door all cute and, you know, like the ideal girlfriend kind of idea.

ALEXANDRA: And Leslie says that on some of these shows, Girls' Generation would appear with boy bands.

LESLIE TUMBACO: You know, who were also promoting at the same time, groups such as Super Junior, SS501 and DBSK. Okay, so these three groups in, like, various shows, they would be, like, standing next to each other on stage, talking to each other during variety shows. And ...

ALEXANDRA: And some of the fans thought that the Girls' Generation girls were flirting with some of the boy bands. Like, you know, these little sidelong glances or teasing them.

LESLIE TUMBACO: And so that interaction, seeing that, fans were very, very, very upset about that. And so all the fans of the three groups ...

ALEXANDRA: The three boy bands.

LESLIE TUMBACO: ... got together and decided to do a black ocean.

ROBERT: What is that?

ALEXANDRA: We're gonna get there. We're gonna get there.

ROBERT: Okay.

ALEXANDRA: Fast forward to June 7, 2008. All of those bands that were on those TV shows are playing this big K-Pop concert.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: This event called ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, concert announcer: Dream concert!]

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Dream Concert.

ALEXANDRA: A huge stadium show. Like, more than 40,000 fans. And Suk-Young told me that there's one thing you need to know about fans, about K-Pop fans at live events. They all have light sticks.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: And they come in different colors.

ALEXANDRA: Because each band has its own color.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Super Junior, for example, has blue. And when they appear on stage, you see this sea of blue light sticks waving in support of their stars on stage.

ALEXANDRA: So they played for a while. When SS501 comes out, the whole place just turns to light green. Show goes on. TVXQ comes to the stage, and then up go thousands and thousands of these ruby red glittery lights. And at some point, Girls' Generation takes the stage. And here's the thing: pretty much as soon as they walk on stage ...

LESLIE TUMBACO: All the people in the audience turned off their light sticks.

JAD: What?

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Suddenly there was blackout in the whole auditorium.

LESLIE TUMBACO: Everybody stops clapping, screaming. Silence.

JAD: Are you saying like the whole—like, everybody? 40,000 people?

LESLIE TUMBACO: Yes. And if you look up pictures of it, it was a stadium performance. The entire stadium was black.

JAD: No way!

ALEXANDRA: Yes way!

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Girls' Generation had to sing and dance to this silent crowd.

JAD: Well, how on Earth did they pull that off? How could you get this many people doing the same thing?

ALEXANDRA: Okay, so the way that these shows happen, at least at these Dream Concerts, is that different sections of the auditorium belong to different fan groups.

ROBERT: Oh, so they sell it as zone seating.

ALEXANDRA: Right. So the fan clubs actually get to, like, dole out the tickets. And during the show, there's this moment where some of the fan club leaders stood up and held up these signs that said "Quiet."

JAD: Dude!

ROBERT: This is—this is that upsetting?

ALEXANDRA: Yeah.

JAD: Okay, wait a second. If you—if you would allow me to frame for a second.

ALEXANDRA: Yes.

JAD: So what have we learned so far? We've learned that this is a global phenomenon.

ROBERT: This is a nightmare. Total nightmare.

JAD: It's a global phenomenon, born of the nightmare of these stars who seem to be tightly held in check by everybody—the fans, the agencies, everybody. That's what we know so far.

ROBERT: That's what we know so far.

JAD: Okay.

ALEXANDRA: But—and this is why I wanted to do this whole story in the first place—just a couple years ago in walks this guy, and he just messes everything up.

[Receptionist speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: We sent an interpreter with a mic over to the Gangnam District in Seoul to speak with a guy named Lee Myung-Joo. But, you know, he told me to call him Mr. Lee.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) Yeah, are you guys ready?

ALEXANDRA: Yep.

ALEXANDRA: Okay, so here's the story.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: In the early 2000s, Mr. Lee, he was working at a news organization called Sports Seoul, which did all kinds of things, not just sports. They also did, like, business and entertainment.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: He was actually in charge of all the online news. And while he was there, I think it's fair to say that he took his reporting very seriously. Like, he always had this idea in his mind.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) That I believe any content that can be published, that's possible to publish, should be freely published. That's the kind of culture that would be better to have.

ALEXANDRA: So he was a guy who believed in an independent press. But he also knew that there were certain things that he just couldn't report on.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: That certain subjects like politics were just dangerous.

JAD: How? Why?

ALEXANDRA: We actually need to back up a little bit, put this into a little bit of context.

JAD: All right.

ALEXANDRA: So between—like, after the Korean War, between say the '60s and the '80s, South Korea was under a series of military dictatorships. And there was basically a censorship of the press. Things got a lot better in the '90s when they turn to civilian rule, but even today, the government still has a branch that goes around the internet and deletes websites for their content. So this is the—this is, like, the world in which the press is living in.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: So getting back to Mr. Lee. It's 2010, he's at Sports Seoul having dreams of independence, and he feels like politics is a little tricky. So he does what to me feels like a little bit of a Trojan horse move.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: Basically, he says "If I can't do independent reporting in politics, I'll just sneak it into celebrity news."

JAD: Oh!

ALEXANDRA: So ...

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) So we looked on the internet for Hollywood news and media in the UK, and looked at what they were doing.

ALEXANDRA: So he studied The Sun, US Weekly, TMZ.

JAD: Wait, he studied TMZ?

ALEXANDRA: That's what he said. You know, how they take their pictures. How close do they get?

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) Because there isn't—there wasn't paparazzi in Korea. And we decided to apply that to South Korea.

ALEXANDRA: Their first target were these two stars: Jonghyun, who is an idol from a boy band called Shinee. Huge band. And an actress. Her name is Shin Se Kyung.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) First you have to go through the information-gathering process.

ALEXANDRA: So they tailed both these stars on and off.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) For one month.

JAD: Whoa!

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) To get a sense of their movement patterns.

ALEXANDRA: You know, and they figure out that they have this pattern of meeting up in front of her apartment really early in the morning, like 3:00 in the morning or something, and they take these walks. So late October, 2010, one of Mr. Lee's reporters stakes out the apartment. And the two stars meet up to take their walk, and you get the very first paparazzi photos as far as we know in Korea.

JAD: Huh. What do these photos look like?

ALEXANDRA: Well, I think they're so cute. It's these two idols, you know, walking down the street hand in hand under these yellow street lights, and they just look like they're in their own little world. There's this one photo where he's pulling back her hair and I think he's putting, like, an earbud in her ear and they're maybe they're sharing a song, they're listening to a song together.

JAD: Aww!

ALEXANDRA: He's got her purse on his shoulder. You know, he's just holding her bag for her.

JAD: And hat happens when the photographer guy runs up and goes click, click, click, click, click in their face?

ALEXANDRA: Well, the guys at Sports Seoul kind of drew this line. They were like, we're gonna keep back a distance from the celebrities.

ROBERT: Oh, so there's a silent click, click, click, coming through a car window.

ALEXANDRA: Right.

JAD: Do they see the guy?

ALEXANDRA: No, they don't. And that's why these photos, they're—it's not like that typical, like, hands in the face photo. They just look totally serene.

ROBERT: At this moment, these two innocents are truly innocent. They have no reason to expect anyone to be out there at all.

ALEXANDRA: Right. Because, you know, before this moment, there weren't paparazzi photographers stalking celebrities like this.

JAD: This is Eden right here. This is Eden.

ALEXANDRA: Yeah, this is ...

ROBERT: Just before the fall. Let's move onto the fall!

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: Mr. Lee said right before they published, all of the reporters got together and stayed in the office all night. And everybody was on pins and needles because, you know, they didn't know. They didn't know what was gonna happen. Are people gonna be outraged? Are they gonna be totally excited about this? They just had no idea what was gonna happen.

JAD: And you also will have no idea what's gonna happen. Until after the break.

JAD: Jad. Robert. Radiolab. Back to our story from reporter Alex Young.

ALEXANDRA: So when we left off, we were talking about Lee Myung-Joo. Mr. Lee. He and his team had just captured the first paparazzi moment in South Korea. They had taken a picture of these two stars. They were just about to publish, had no idea what was gonna happen.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) And when we first published them ...

ALEXANDRA: People went crazy!

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. The photos went viral. There was an incredible amount of web traffic. Like, so much that our servers were breaking down.

JAD: So people clicked.

ALEXANDRA: Oh, yeah. At first they just—you know, they just inundated the website trying to look at these photos. But then they rushed over to the fan sites, and four of the websites from the boy band, the guy, crashed. Shin Se Kyung's website, it just gets flooded with comments.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Rumors, vile comments about how the fans felt betrayed.

ALEXANDRA: People were, like, posting defaced pictures of her.

LESLIE TUMBACO: In typical sexist ways, she got the brunt of it.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: You know, when I talk to Lee Myung-Joo, he—he was the first one to recognize that. Usually when this kind of scandal breaks, it's the woman who gets it worse.

JAD: Yeah. Yeah. So how—how did the agencies respond?

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) Shock. In the beginning, you could tell that the companies were not prepared, because their official statement would be like, "We need to talk to the celebrity." Or, "We had no idea this was going on." And you could see that the companies were struggling.

ALEXANDRA: There was actually, you know, a couple times later on where God, the fans got really crazy. And they would actually protest at, like, their live shows or whatever. And then pretty much the next day, like, after the protest, the idol at the center of that scandal would just kind of vanish. Like, they would just take an indefinite hiatus from all of their, like, promotional activities.

JAD: Like, you mean, like, the agencies just yanked them?

ALEXANDRA: I mean, yeah. That was the suggestion, yeah.

JAD: And did the agencies say anything about that to you?

ALEXANDRA: No one would go on the record with me, but I did talk to some people over email, and they said that, you know, when fans react this way, they're kind of forced to take drastic action.

JAD: So they kind of confirmed that they were disappearing idols?

ALEXANDRA: They confirmed with me that they were 'taking action.' [laughs] But here's what ends up happening.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: Lee Myung-Joo says, you know, that very first scandal that they broke, yeah, they got a lot of backlash but it showed them that ...

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) What worked in the foreign media could also work in South Korea. So it gave us strength to keep experimenting.

ALEXANDRA: So in 2011, Lee Myung-Joo and, like, a couple of the people from Sports Seoul, they break off and they form this company called Dispatch. And then the following years, 2012-2013, this is a really important chunk of time where they just start pumping out scandals.

LEE MYUNG-JOO: (through interpreter) We must have done more than 10 stories small and big.

ALEXANDRA: Do you want to hear the list?

JAD: I do want to hear the list.

ALEXANDRA: First off, there's Park Jeong, she's dating Mr. P. Then there's Goo Hara who's with Junhyung. Then there's Tachyon who gets caught with Jessica. Rain dating Kim Tae Hee. And you have Yuna dating Lee Sun Hee. Sulli, that was like a crazy one. And of course, we all remember Baekhyun and Taeyeon.

JAD: I don't remember.

ALEXANDRA: Oh, I remember. But according to Suk-Young Kim, you had so many scandals in such a short period of time.

SUK-YOUNG KIM: Headlines after headlines after headlines at such a frequent rate, that we fans became somehow desensitized by this news.

AJ PARK: It shook us. And I'm gonna put myself in there now, yeah. It shook us. [laughs]

ALEXANDRA: According to writer AJ Park, what you saw after this crazy onslaught of scandals is, well, a couple things. So the paparazzi ...

AJ PARK: Became a trend, something that all the Korean entertainment news started picking up.

ALEXANDRA: There starts to be all these other paparazzi companies that come out.

JAD: Competitors?

ALEXANDRA: Exactly. Just like Dispatch but with a different name. But the craziest part I think is that you start seeing celebrities tiptoeing out and telling the truth about their lives.

AJ PARK: Little by little, the celebrities would get more comfortable about revealing it themselves.

ALEXANDRA: For instance, in 2012 on this talk show ...

AJ PARK: Kwon Hee, who is a member of this K-Pop boy band, he made waves because he explained that celebrities date in cars.

ALEXANDRA: And I think that the audience reaction is, like, super telling because you can hear it in the tape, they're laughing.

ROBERT: So he's breaking the spell, and what you expect is, "Gasp!"

ALEXANDRA: Yeah.

ROBERT: And what you get is ...

ALEXANDRA: Casual laughter.

ROBERT: So that's a sea change.

JAD: That's a real sea change. So—and this happened in just two years, you're saying?

ALEXANDRA: We probably have to say five years.

JAD: Yeah, but still I mean that's—see, this actually does make me think—I mean well, first of all it's interesting to think of paparazzi as liberators in this case.

ALEXANDRA: Totally, totally.

JAD: Because we're used to thinking of them as, like, scum. But I mean, if you pan out, here's literally the thought I'm having. Like, there's a tendency—because we're dumb Westerners—to sort of see what happens in places like Korea as being very different from us. Like, culturally separate.

ALEXANDRA: Yeah.

JAD: But to hear that they change that quickly makes me think in some way that we're all very similar.

ALEXANDRA: Hmm.

JAD: Or maybe we're all headed to the same place and, like, tabloid is the great equalizer. And maybe we're all gonna just end up all of us in post-Kardashian hell.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Like, literally this is how far they traveled in five years, and literally in another five years you will have the Kardashian family of Korea.

ALEXANDRA: Right, right, right.

JAD: Just dishing all the time and making sex tapes on their own or whatever it is.

ALEXANDRA: I also thought the same thing. You know, being from America you're like, "Well, this is just inevitable." But I—I actually don't think so anymore.

JAD: Hmm.

ALEXANDRA: AJ told me a story that really changed my mind.

AJ PARK: It was like—it was our Watergate. It was our K-popgate. It was—it changed everything.

ALEXANDRA: This story, it revolves around this one young female solo artist, Ailee. She's just hugely popular. I mean, they actually call her the Korean Beyoncé. And in 2013, she was just killing it. By this point, Ailee has a couple albums out, her YouTube videos have millions and millions of views. But then in November 2013, a bomb drops.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, phone call: [speaking Korean]]

ALEXANDRA: This guy cold calls Dispatch. Mr. Lee actually picks up, and he recorded this phone call between them. And the guy tells him, "I have nude pictures of Ailee."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, phone call: [speaking Korean]]

JAD: What exactly is he asking?

ALEXANDRA: So he's calling Dispatch to see how much these nude photos are worth. And Mr. Lee tells him ...

LEE MYUNG-JOO: [speaking Korean]

ALEXANDRA: "We don't want your photos." And then if you keep listening to the phone call, you can hear him start getting really upset. Like, "This is not right. You're crossing a line." So to make a long story short, Dispatch turns down the photos, and the photos somehow make their way to a competitor's website.

AJ PARK: This one American K-Pop website called AllKPop.

ALEXANDRA: Who was pretty big. They were probably the number one K-Pop site at that time.

ROBERT: In the world?

ALEXANDRA: For English speakers.

ROBERT: Oh, for English speakers. And they published the naked pictures?

ALEXANDRA: They're the ones who published the naked pictures.

AJ PARK: Can't remember if they censored it or not, but if they did it wasn't a very good job. Like, you could see.

ALEXANDRA: So the photos come out. And what would you expect to happen?

JAD: Some anger, maybe? A little bit? And then basically people just click on the pictures?

ALEXANDRA: No. Instantly, the entire K-Pop world bands together black ocean-style and just comes out against AllKPop. The agencies, they start threatening to sue, this competitor website starts this boycott. And in just a few days, the figure was, like, 22,000 Twitter followers just stopped following them. Really their—their reputation just tanks.

AJ PARK: It was a warning to them. You know, don't mess with us. And so they really haven't—I mean, I haven't really followed them in a while, but they haven't recovered since then.

ALEXANDRA: But what I think is the most surprising part of this is just three days after the photos come out, was the night of one of South Korea's biggest award ceremonies called the Melon Music Awards. And, you know, scheduled for that night, Ailee was supposed to receive one of these Top 10 Artist of The Year awards. And I think to everyone's surprise, she actually showed up. And about two hours in ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, awards show: Ailee!]

ALEXANDRA: You know, they call her name. And she stands up, walks to center stage, goes to the presenters. She takes a bow, and she looks—I think she looks fraught, or at least overwhelmed. But then she faces the crowd. At one point her face kind of cracks. She puts her head in her elbow and she starts crying. She says, "It really means a lot to me that you supported me, that you believed in me, despite everything that's going on. Thank you." And then she walked off stage. For me, this story shows that they're gonna draw a line in the sand that's different from ours.

AJ PARK: I mean culturally, Koreans we're a little more strict. And also I think there's also a part where we look at the US and we're like, "Come on, guys!" [laughs] You know, like we see them as an example of let's not totally go there.

ALEXANDRA: So like, the US is a cautionary tale?

AJ PARK: Yeah, like don't ever get to that point, guys.

ROBERT: And maybe this is one of those ones where you really wonder, like, is there a cultural difference that runs deep enough that you can say 'Shh' to the part of you that says, "I want to know, I want to see, I want to hear." And I ...

JAD: You think that ultimately there might be a ...?

ROBERT: I don't know.

JAD: Part of me thinks that as the—when it gets so easy to know the most intimate details about anyone, we'll all give in. I don't know, there's part of me that just feels that way about humans.

ALEXANDRA: Yeah, I don't know. I have to go with Robert on this one.

JAD: Well, I'm gonna have to go with Ailee.

ALEXANDRA: Oh, me too.

JAD: Thank you, Alex.

ALEXANDRA: Thank you.

JAD: This piece was produced by Matt Kielty with Alex Young. Reported by Alex and also Brenna Farrell. Thanks to our guests Suk-Young Kim, AJ Park, Leslie Tumbaco, Lee Myung-Joo, Sarah Wolfgang. And very special thanks to our stringer and interpreter Haeryun Kang, Joseph Kim, Jeremy Bloom, Jiin Choi and the K-Pop supergroup Crayon Pop who happens to be on Alex's playlist, Spotify playlist, which also has, like, K-Pop favorites from the entire staff. That's at Radiolab.org.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[LESLIE TUMBACO: Hey, it's Leslie Tumbaco. I was calling about the Radiolab credits.]

[AJ PARK: Hi, this is AJ from Soompi.]

[SUK-YOUNG KIM: Hi this is Suk-Young Kim calling.]

[LESLIE TUMBACO: I don't know if it's too late, but I'll just go ahead and give it a try. Here goes. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes ...]

[SUK-YOUNG KIM: Simon Adler, Brenna Farrell.]

[AJ PARK: David Gebel, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser.]

[LESLIE TUMBACO: Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster.]

[SUK-YOUNG KIM: Soren Wheeler and Jamie York.]

[AJ PARK: With help from Alexandra Leigh Young.]

[SUK-YOUNG KIM: Tracie Hunte, Stephanie Tam, and Micah Loewinger.]

[AJ PARK: Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Yay, Radiolab!]

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