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responsive to Cohen's (3) call for studies of media behavior on a variety of foreign policy issue areas. Although less widely known, the South Korean case is equally as instructive as the Iran hostage crisis, the "people power" revolution in the Philippines, or the more recent massacre in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. All were watershed political occurrences, with direct implications for those nations' relations with the United States. In each case, television is widely thought to have played a new and important role in thepolicy process. Furthermore, each centrally involved questions about the proper U. S .policy toward autocratic or dictatorial governments in other nations.

The title of the present study is drawn from the Reagan administration's decision to curtail public discussion of human rights issues in Korea and elsewhere, in a major departure from the policy of the Carter administration. The rationale for such a shift toward quiet diplomacy was articulated in the fall of 1979 in a widely publicized article on " Dictatorships and Double Standards" by Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who later served as the U .S. permanent representative to the United Nations in the Reagan administration. (4) In it she argued that the Carter administration had participated actively in the toppling of non-Communist autocracies in such nations as Iran and Nicaragua while remaining passive in the face of Communist expansion. She further suggested that such a policy was based on flawed assumptions and that right-wing autocracies, given favorable economic, social, and political circumstances, could be democratized. Despite its appeal to the incoming Reagan administration, the notion of quiet diplomacy runs counter to the idea that television and the other media have transformed modern diplomacy by bringing about a collapse of reticence and privacy in international negotiations.(5)

At least four considerations underscore the cogency of the Korean case and help to structure the following analysis. The final three of them correspond with Adams'(4) typology of news dynamics based on the components of media intensity, thematic affinity, and image continuity.