This paper suggests that the evolution of media reporting anonymous suspects from covering real names is likely to occur when the National Human Rights Institution （NHRI） refrains police from abusing the suspect’s human rights during criminal investigations.

The media reports on crime in South Korea do not consist of both suspects’ names and pictures, but this had not been the case until the 1990s. After the democratization, the Korean government geared toward introducing new institutions to promote their democracy and human rights norms. One of them was the National Human Rights Commission of Korea （NHRCK）, established in 2001. NHRCK is an independent institution from the government, and its major role is the prevention of human rights abuses committed by criminal investigations at the hands of the police and prosecutor’s office. A series of incidents made clear the police’s poor understanding of suspects’ and victims’ human rights, instigating the NHRCK to intervene in the investigative process. As a result of this, the police and the prosecutor’s office amended their investigation rules to help maintain suspects’ and victims’ privacy and rights.

The Korean media, which had reported suspects’ privacy until then, changed their policies so as not to report the names or pictures of suspects because they conceived a major change in human rights norms in Korea. Public figures such as politicians, public officers, C.E.O.s, etc., however, are not included in the list, so the media does not hesitate to report their corruption by real name.

Yet, an argument postulating that heinous criminals must be reported under their real names exists, and this led to the establishment of police’s Personal Information Disclosure Commission, an organization which decides whether a criminal’s personal information is worth reporting to the public. The principal of the media, however, remains reporting suspects not by their real names, and this is unlikely to change soon.