Where are the Korean voices?

By John Burton

A month after the Singapore summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, the consensus in the U.S. media remains largely negative about the event. There have been recent reports based on intelligence leaks from the Pentagon, for example, that Pyongyang is continuing to expand its nuclear and missile programs despite its promises to Trump that it would denuclearize.

In contrast, little attention is given in the U.S. to the continuing examples of engagement between the two Koreas, such as last week's inter-Korean basketball games in Pyongyang, the first joint sporting event in 15 years. Scant notice is paid to the fact that a majority of Koreans support the engagement policy championed by President Moon Jae-in, who is enjoying record popularity as highlighted in the recent local elections that his Democratic Party of Korea party swept.

The skeptical mood in the U.S. was set immediately after the summit by influential opinion makers and pundits in leading media outlets. According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive media watchdog group, of the 41 opinion pieces published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal on the summit in the first week after the event, only 4 were positive. In contrast, 29 were negative and eight were mixed or ambiguous.

As FAIR noted, "the bulk of U.S. coverage ranged from snide dismissal to outright opposition" of the summit.

Moreover, Korean voices in these agenda-setting publications were largely absent. Just prior the summit, Cho Yoon-je, the Korean ambassador to the U.S., published an op-ed in the Washington Post supporting Trump's initiative with North Korea, while Moon Chung-in, one of the president's leading national security advisors, contributed a column in The Washington Post after the summit. That was it.

Breaking the grip of the established Washington commentariat is difficult, with editorial page editors and guest bookers for the cable news networks returning to the same names time and again. Most of the Korean "experts" quoted are associated with the leading think tanks, such the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings Institution, and often come with a national security background in the CIA or Pentagon. As a result, they naturally reflect the views of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, while giving little expression to how events are viewed from Seoul.

The U.S. media not only almost exclusively looks at the events on the Korean peninsula through a Cold War lens, but has become fixated on whether the Singapore summit and its aftermath will help or hurt Trump. This reflects the increased partisanship in the U.S.

Liberal commentators, who supported engagement with North Korea under the Clinton and Obama administrations, now condemn Trump for doing the same thing. They fear that any success achieved by Trump on the North Korean issue will boost his chances for re-election in 2020. Less surprising is that establishment conservative Republicans also oppose Trump on both national security and personal grounds.

The language employed among both liberals and conservatives against Trump is remarkably similar as they accuse him of being "weak" or "giving away too much" or being "played" by Pyongyang.

Defenders of Trump's North Korea policy come either from the president's die-hard supporters or, ironically, Democrat progressives who favor engagement with Pyongyang on its own merits. Neither group is particularly welcomed on the opinion pages or cable news because their views do not supposedly reflect the mainstream consensus when it comes to the North Korea issue. This is despite the fact that about half of Americans supported the Singapore summit.

With the focus in the U.S. media nearly solely directed to what the Trump administration is doing on North Korea, it is often forgotten among Americans that the initial push toward engagement this year was undertaken by the two Koreas.

Providing a voice to Korean views in the U.S. media has become more problematic. Due to budget cuts that are impacting the media industry in general, the number of U.S. journalists based in Seoul is now largely limited to the wire services and the big three major U.S. newspapers despite Korea's status as a top U.S. foreign policy issue. Their reporting often reflects what their editors in the U.S. want, i.e. how developments on the Korean peninsula affect American interests ― not those of Koreans ― although they will be the ones most affected by the decisions taken in Washington.

Changing this U.S. media echo chamber will not be easy. Frankly, it is easier and less time consuming for reporters and cable news to turn to the same "talking heads" for comments rather than search for alternative voices, even when articulate English-speaking ones from Korea are available.

Nonetheless, it is also time for the Korean government to step up its communications game and do its best to reach out to the U.S media, particularly in Washington, to make its message known.

John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is now a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.