Abstract

South Korean advertising has been historically subjected to rigorous scrutiny by various authorized and self-appointed organizations. By the early 2000s, however, interference with advertising grew harder to justify even to the censors themselves, as liberal freedom became a hegemonic ideal. I draw on ethnographic observation at a quasi-government censorship board, the Korea Communications Standards Commission, to explore how advertising censors navigated the contradictory demands to protect the unwary public and to respect advertisers’ freedom. I argue that advertising censorship, though ostensibly limiting advertising discourses, ultimately produced “smart” consumers, to use the censors’ parlance—subjects whose cynical distance toward advertising allowed maximum freedoms for advertisers. Overall, the article suggests that the censors’ quandaries exemplified the deadlock in the liberal ideologies of freedom.

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