“Bad money drives out good.”
That is Gresham’s law: the old economic observation that when money of lesser value takes over the market, money of greater value is put away and disappears from circulation.
Its reach extends beyond money. Throughout our lives, we see immediate gain push aside things of lasting value. Faster. More provocative. More abundant. In that current, the slow and the honest often lose their place.
I believe we cannot simply let that happen.
Information now pours over us like a flood. With AI, anyone can produce and circulate writing in an instant. Yet even as information has multiplied, discerning the facts has become harder. Competing accounts of the same event abound. It is increasingly easy to choose the story we want to believe and mistake it for the world. This is the paradox of abundance.
The EEJE seeks to place a sieve in the middle of that flood.
We put reports on the same event side by side. We compare Korean newspapers with reporting from abroad. We check the words and numbers in an article against the original material. We examine what was covered and what was left out. AI then offers interpretations, pointing to the evidence at each step.
This sieve does not tell you what to believe. It shows you what has been mixed together. Judgement always belongs to the reader. We will not label outlets by political camp. We will apply the same standards to every outlet—and make those standards, and our own mistakes, public.
This small effort, too, may one day be driven out by the bad. Even so, we begin. We want to help take even one step towards a world in which good money is recognised as good, and good information receives the value it deserves.
May your judgement remain clear amid the flood. Beside you, may The EEJE be a sieve you can trust.
News, now. The EEJE.
We bring The EEJE into the world: a publication that compares the reporting.
Wonjae Lee (이원재)
Publisher