On ‘Gag Concert‘ recently, the name of JYJ‘s Junsu was censored out of the broadcast in the KBS editing room, and understandably people jumped to the most obvious conclusion possible: that broadcasters were trying as hard as possible to wipe any mention of JYJ members.
The skit itself involved the naming of male celebrities who play soccer, and Junsu was mentioned since he’s one of the most prominent ones who do. Oddly enough though, his name was muted on broadcast even though it was clearly said live.
Sketchy, and fans thought so too, which made the producer give this explanation:
“During the editing process, we thought that nowadays, Junsu is known as ‘XIA’ not Junsu or ‘XIA Junsu’ [for his music promotions]. Park Yoochun and Kim Jaejoong are active under their own names, so we believed using ‘XIA Junsu’ would only hurt fans. So we censored ‘XIA’ but only for ‘Junsu’ to barely be heard as well. Only ‘XIA’ was muted. It seems we have unintentionally created a misunderstanding with fans.”
I’ll admit that I’m not up to the times with the JYJ fandom, so this may be a legit thing where naming him as ‘XIA Junsu’ would cause even greater backlash than risking this current backlash of censoring his name out … but certainly I’ve never heard of any controversies over using ‘XIA Junsu’, so excuse seems like a reach of an explanation to me.
Regardless of what the truth is, this is the kind of issue that I’m talking about when it comes to the hopelessness of trying to break a blacklisting through legislation.