November 8, 2006

If the American public isn't well informed about Korea, the American press is partly to blame. "Coverage of Korea has [traditionally] intensified during crises," like the Korean War, the Kwangju Uprising and the IMF Crisis, says Donald Kirk, longtime Asia correspondent for the International Herald Tribune, Asian Wall Street Journal and South China Morning Post, as well as editor of a new collection of journalism on Korea: Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm. But after the crises abate, Kirk says, so does the media's interest in Korea.

This pattern of alternating excitement and disinterest isn't new. In 1871, photographer Felice Beato became the first American journalist to visit Korea when he rushed to cover the Kanghwa Island conflict, but Beato left shortly after the shooting stopped. News of Korea's anti-Japanese rebellion in March of 1919 reached the outside world only because an American businessman happened to be in the country and filed a report for the Associated Press.

Western journalists who wanted to continue covering Korea after the frenzy of press activity during the Korean War faced opposition from the country's military government. For much of his rule, Park Chung-hee prevented foreign news organizations from setting up bureaus in Seoul. Prior to the late 1970s, when the Wall Street Journal became the first paper to establish a permanent presence in the country, most of what reached the West about Korea came from a small set of Korean correspondents.

Korea became friendlier to press during the 1980s, though the government still regulated access to sources and mandated that official "minders" be present at interviews. By the early 1990s, however, the information control regimen had fallen away entirely.

This openness hasn't done much to change the "crisis coverage" mentality of most American news organizations. The pattern continues to the present. Just weeks ago, the American media was buzzing with stories about North Korea's nuclear test. Now, even with North Korea's return to the Six-Party Talks tenuous, coverage has dropped off precipitously. Meanwhile, major stories in Korea-such as the progress of the ongoing U.S.-ROK free trade talks-go entirely unreported in major papers.

Unfortunately, Kirk feels, there probably isn't much that can change this pattern, at least in the near term.