Mediated Public Diplomacy:Agenda Building Of North Korea Nuclear Crisis From Press Release To Media Coverage

The North Korea nuclear crisis,an enduring security conundrum in Asia Pacific and the world at large,is becoming more severe recently.During the international conflict,media play an increasingly important role and actively participate in the diplomatic process.The main idea of mediated public diplomacy is to increase the support of a country’s foreign policies among audiences in other countries,especially in the case of international conflicts or diplomatic events.Therefore,setting the agenda for international media becomes the first step of this practice.Grounded in the mediated public diplomacy and agenda building theoretical perspective,this research investigated the relationship between government agenda and media agenda of international news agencies in China,South Korea and the United States regarding the North Korea nuclear crisis,and analyzed the news sourcing patterns in Xinhua,Yonhap and Associated Press when covering this conflict issue.The study found evidence for the first-level agenda building(issue agenda)in all three countries,while for the second-level agenda building,the governments in all three countries didn’t succeed in completely setting the attribute agenda for the media either domestically or transnationally.The government’s influence in setting attribute agenda didn’t demonstrate consistency among various issues,in other words,the success in setting the media attribute agenda for one issue does not necessarily lead to the same success in another one.Difference was also found between government and media’s attribute agenda: government focused on “cooperation” while media emphasized more on “conflict”.In terms of sourcing pattern,Associated Press and Yonhap news agency showed a nationalistic bias in selecting news sources.And Xinhua quoted North Korean sources most frequently and was relatively balanced in quoting sources from other countries.Finally,the study tried to explore the reason of such difference between government and media agenda from the perspective of news production and state-press relationship,and consider how the levels of policy certainty might influence government-media relations.