11_Seo_Media and Foreign Policy

This study examines journalists' role conceptions in their coverage of diplomatic issues, strongly that journalists are participants in the negotiation process and that news sources have significant influence on their judgments of the newsworthiness of issues related to the talks. This comparative study offers important implications for the press-government relationships in foreign affairs issues. The role of the media in foreign affairs and international issues has garnered growing attention from scholars, as it has been assumed that the end of the Cold War and advances in communication technologies have increased the ability of the media to influence the foreign policy process (Gilboa 2006). While scholars have presented different opinions and findings regarding the media's roles in shaping foreign policy decision-making That is particularly the case when countries use the media for communication with parties with whom they don't have effective or viable dialogue channels, demonstrating the media's involvement in complex foreign policy processes remains a major challenge. One of the most important topics to examine in this area of research is how journalists view their roles in foreign policy, as studies have shown that journalists' subjective beliefs empirical research has dealt with a specific topic of journalists' perceptions of their own role in attempts to fill part of that gap by investigating how diplomatic correspondents of a number of different countries perceive their roles in foreign policy. The event this study focuses on is the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions, a negotiation process that began in 2003 and has continued, unfinished, through early 2009. Involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan, and Russia, the talks serve as an important opportunity to explore the press-government relationship. The six-party talks feature some elements of media diplomacy the participating governments have often used the media to convey their positions to their counterparts or to influence the atmosphere of the negotiations. 1 In addition, the six-party nuclear talks are instances of closed-door diplomacy, which poses a great challenge to reporters because governments release only technical aspects of the negotiation process to the media and excludes the more substantive aspects (Gilboa 2000:282). While journalists have very limited access to the event, they are under tremendous pressure from their editors and the public to offer information about it (Donsbach 2004; Gilboa 2000). In this sense, the six-party nuclear talks can 1 Sanger, David. 2003. " North Korea Says It May Test an …