Foreign Correspondents and Their News Frames: A Study of News Contents on North Korea

Abstract

News contents about foreign countries can be misleading because they are often shaped by government policies related to national interests. But individual journalists’ attitudes and news organizations’ ideologies also affect news contents about foreign countries. In the case of foreign correspondents dealing with international news, how do these three factors — government policy, corporate ideology and individual attitude — affect their news coverage? To answer this question, the paper analyzed the news frames of foreign correspondents based in Seoul as pertaining to their news stories about North Korea’s nuclear issue. Eight newspapers from five nations with high stakes in the issue — the U.S., the U.K., Russia, Japan and China — were selected for the analysis. In-depth interviews with the Seoul correspondents of these newspapers were also conducted. The results show that government policy is a main factor deciding their news frames. But the role of individual attitudes increases in relation to the capabilities of the individual correspondent. That is, those correspondents with longer experiences and better knowledge of local culture or language were found to have more control in their news frames.