“When you talk to people in Washington and Seoul, they all seem quite happy with the current situation in the Alliance,” said Gi-wook Shin, Director of the Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, speaking in the KORUS Forum at the Korean Embassy’s KORUS House on May 13, 2010. “Things are going very, very well. But if you go back to early 2000, things were quite different.”

 

Shin, also a professor of sociology, began to ask why tensions in the relationship seemed to fluctuate so dramatically in recent decades. His subsequent research examined thousands of Korean and U.S. print media articles over a 10-year period for tone and substance, and he came to the conclusion that the two nations see their longstanding relationship in very different contexts. The results are compiled in his new book, One Alliance, Two Lenses: U.S.-Korea Relations in a New Era (available from Stanford University Press at www.sup.org).

 

“Koreans and Americans approach the Alliance from different frameworks,” Shin said. “For Americans, Korea is a policy issue. It’s not much more than that. The U.S. has many allies, and the ROK is one of many.... But for Koreans, the U.S. and the Alliance is a much bigger issue. It’s more than a policy issue. I argue that the U.S. is a significant other for Koreans in shaping their national identity.”

 

 

Over the course of two years, Shin and his research staff at Stanford examined about 5,000 articles from three major U.S. newspapers (The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal), and about 3000 from two major Korean newspapers (Chosun Ilbo and The Hankyoreh), all published between 1994 and 2004.

 

“Obviously the media play a very important role not only in reflecting public opinion, but also they can shape the agenda for public discussion and debate. So we decided to do this study through the media.”

 

Among the findings he reported, there were slightly more U.S. articles focused on the Republic of Korea (46.3%) than North Korea (38.6%). Korea-U.S. bilateral relations made up most of the remainder. U.S. print coverage of South Korea tended to focus on the country itself (e.g. its rising economic status), rather than Korea-U.S. relations and the Alliance, while coverage of North Korea was the opposite: it focused mostly on its poor relations with the United States, rather than developments in the communist country itself.

 

“One main difference between the U.S. and Korean media is that the Korean media pays much more attention to the bilateral relationship,” Shin said. Less that 10% of the Korea-related U.S. articles they studied looked at the relationship itself, while more than 30% of U.S.-related Korean articles did.

 

For the United States, Shin said, Korea is an economic issue, and for the Republic of Korea (ROK), the U.S. is primarily a security-related issue. “That’s understandable given the situation on the peninsula,” he added. The presence of U.S. troops stationed in the ROK—which today number about 28,500—was also the most common subject within Korean articles about the bilateral relationship, while in the United States, this subject gets virtually no coverage at all.

 

U.S. coverage of Korea in general also has strong negative points, Shins said: the most frequently covered Korea topic among the U.S. newspapers was North Korean weapons of mass destruction—about 30% of all articles related to Korea. The ROK economy was the second most common topic, at about 20% of all articles on Korea.

 

“I think this will give a very powerful image of Korea among the American public because when it comes down to Korean issues, [there are] mainly two things: economy or security,” Shin said. “There isn’t much difference between the three papers in terms of their coverage of DPRK.... About three quarters is security.”

 

Shin also acknowledged that while the U.S. newspapers they studied cover a broad swath of mainstream American print media, the two Korean papers were selected merely to embody the two main political views. “My main objective is not really analyzing newspapers per se. I’m trying to analyze conservative and progressive views through these papers,” Shin said, noting Chosun’s significantly larger readership, and the presence of other prominent papers elsewhere on the political spectrum. “How do you capture those views? That’s why I’m using Chosun as representing the conservative perspective and Hankyoreh as representing progressive views.”

 

 

Shin concludes that the media trends illustrated in his research are evidence of a bilateral relationship where each country has its own asymmetrical leverage.

 

“In terms of economic and military power, there is no question that the United States is more powerful,” Shin said. “That’s one dimension.... The other, which is quite important, is asymmetry in media attention. In that case, Korea has a clear edge. In some way, this may compensate for weaker power.”

 

Shin pointed out that, overall, news articles about the Korea-U.S. relationship are more than three times more common in the Korean press than in the U.S. press, and among editorial articles, more than 50 times more common. “Because of this asymmetry in media attention, the United States cannot always dictate the terms of the Alliance.”

 

“My main argument is [that] the main factor that created tension in the Alliance, from the American perspective, is the policy rift and dispute. But in the case of Korea, it reflects identity politics, especially between conservatives and progressives.”

 

Despite the different national perspectives on the Alliance, Shin suggested, Presidents Lee and Obama are making it work through close coordination and consultation.

 

“In my view, having different lenses is ok. You don’t have to agree with each other all the time.... The key issue is to respect each other’s views.”

 

By Dynamic-Korea.com