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An important lesson of the Korea case is found in this low-intensity coverage. It shows television's power to create a visual context through less frequent but long-term and consistent attention to predictable themes. The impact of such consistency in visual images may well be heightened when, as in the case of Korea, they have such a highly dramatic focus. The explanation for such an impact is somewhat like the low-involvement hierarchy developed by Krugman to explain why television advertising has an effect through repetition even though most viewers are not strongly involved with either the advertising or its topics. (46) Opinion poll data suggest that television inculcated images of political unrest and violence as a pervasive component in American public perceptions of Korea. Such images were presumably evoked as a background factor when U.S. administrations decided to elevate Korea to public discussion, either through official state visits or by way of public shifts in policy.

Second, the multiplication of channels for such news expands the geopolitical scope of the policy process. Public perceptions of the Kwangju incident and the Chun White House visit were very different in Korea than in the United States, and the evidence suggests that the transnational character of television technology helped to shape these differences. Because of strict military censorship of South Korean media during the May1980 Kwangju incident, an influential and attentive segment of the Korean public received first reports of the tragedy through television news relayed from the United States via satellite and broadcast in South Korea by the Armed Forces Korea Network. Such coverage helped make it inordinately difficult for the military, led by Chun Doo Hwan,to suppress news of the incident. Only eight months later, a much larger South Korean public saw President Chun Doo Hwan visit the White House, with coverage maximized on the government-controlled television systems in South Korea, and with the usual