The Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin (6/17/18) epitomized the zero-sum takes of US pundits.
In major-paper opinion coverage of the Singapore summit, the people with the most to lose and gain from the summit—Koreans—were almost uniformly ignored.
Three major US papers—the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal—had only one Korean-authored op-ed out of 41 opinion pieces on the subject of the Korean peace talks, a pro-summit piece by Moon Chung-in, an aide to South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Of the 41 editorials or op-eds, only four were broadly positive about the Trump/Kim summit, 29 were negative and eight were mixed or ambiguous.
As FAIR has noted (5/7/18), there’s a huge chasm between how recent peace efforts are received in ostensible US ally South Korea and how they’re covered in US media. Polling shows 88 percent of South Koreans in favor of these efforts, while the person spearheading them, President Moon, holds an 86 percent approval rating. But the bulk of US coverage ranges from snide dismissal to outright opposition (FAIR.org, 6/14/18).
The New York Times published one (very qualified) pro-summit piece, by Korean-American Victor Cha (6/12/18). The Washington Post was mostly negative and skeptical, with three exceptions: predictable partisan cheerleading from reliable Trump apologist Marc Thiessen (6/15/17); a measured “wait and see” take from Michael O’Hanlon, a fellow at the Brookings Institution (6/13/18); and the aforementioned piece by President Moon’s aide (6/12/18). The Wall Street Journal’s commentary was uniformly negative.
The US media’s reaction to the summit is almost a mirror image of that of the South Korean public. What do US pundits know that those with something actually at stake—Koreans—don’t know?
Trump showed “reckless disregard for the security concerns of America’s allies,” argued Kori Schake of the International Institute for Strategic Studies–funded by Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin (New York Times, 6/15/18)
One factor is that our media system turns to professional “experts” at a small handful of establishment think tanks, and these are often funded by monied entities with a vested interest in particular kinds of policy (Extra!, 7/13). On international questions, this often means the arms industry, who are major funders of think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). These think tanks produced predict-ably hawkish putdowns of the summit, such as CSIS’s Sue Mi Terry, who told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace, in a rare moment of candor: “A peace treaty, while it sounds great and could be historic, also undermines the justification of our troops staying South Korea.”
The “justification” for troops also happens to be the justification for the weapons systems they come with, namely those of major CSIS donors Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Boeing (FAIR.org, 5/8/17).
Another part of the problem is partisanship. US pundits overwhelmingly view the Kim/Trump summit as a Trump-led or US-directed event, rather than an essential but limited part of a broader peace effort being undertaken by the Koreas themselves. This means the majority of the coverage is based on whether or not the US “won” or “advanced its interests,” not what’s good for the actual people who actually live on the Korean peninsula.
This is an understandable impulse. As Trump increasingly threatens immigrants, citizens of US war zones and a whole host of vulnerable populations, the instinct to oppose anything connected to him is excusable. But in the case of Korea, this has led to a dangerous habit of trying to outflank Trump on the right. This is often achieved through traditionally right-wing tactics, like calling him “weak,” saying he’s “giving away too much,” or some other such chest-pounding bromide.
MSNBC’s most popular liberal commentator, Rachel Maddow, even cooked up a theory that this was all to help the bogeyman of Russia, because that country shares a small land border with North Korea (FAIR.org, 6/14/18).
Occasionally, some perspectives from Korea got through in US media, like a piece by E. Tammy Kim in the New Yorker (6/12/18) that relayed South Korea’s general sense of cautious optimism:
South Koreans do not trust Kim or Trump, or believe in the possibility of a quick reunification. They are simply aware of the toll that 70 years of national division have taken, and are eager for an alternative future.
It would be useful for major curators of US opinion to reach out to those affected by our foreign policy, rather than limiting the scope of debate to partisan pot shots and zero-sum takes.
