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EXCERPTS FROM--"Quiet Diplomacy in a Television Era:
The Media and U.S. Policy toward the Republic of Korea"

Abstract This study examines the role of television coverage in U. S. policy toward South Korea, focusing on the May 1980 Kwangju incident and the subsequent visit of South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan to the White House in February of 1981, It explores these two episodes in the context of major dimensions of U. S. policy toward Korea and the themes developed through sporadic, low-Ievel coverage of Korea by mainstream American media over the years. The analysis underscores the politicalimpact of television's dramatic visual focus, its use of consistent visual images, its expansion of the geopolitical scope of the policy process, and its personalization of policy. The dramatically different public interpretations of the Kwangju incident and Chun visit in Korea versus the United States suggests that President Reagan's first major state visit, during which he declared that his administration would pursue "quiet diplomacy " on human rights in Korea, while successful within the United States and in the short term, was damaging over the long term.

Introduction
Global television(1) is now the principal catalyst in the media-foreign policy relationship,stimulating renewed attention to a subject of perennial concern to scholars, the media,and government officials. However, despite the profusion of studies of media coverage of international affairs during the 1970s and 1980s, the vast majority of such studies only implicitly or tangentially address the relationship of coverage to foreign policy. Moreover, among those studies that do address the nature of the association between media and foreign policy,(2) almost all treat the news media generally, with insufficient attention to the ever more prominent role of television.This paper explores the role of television and the other media in U.S. policy toward the Republic of Korea with particular attention to the 1980 Kwangju incident and the visit of Korean president Chun Doo Hwan to the White House in early 1981. It is