International Issue Paper

International Issue: North Korea’s Return to the Six-Party Talks
    Newspaper is one of the most influential forms of mass media. Thanks to the Internet, we can read every event in newspapers from all over the world, anytime and anywhere. It is not an exaggeration to state that we are surrounded by mass media. People usually think that newspapers always present events in objectively, and people believe that information from newspapers is reliable and accurate. However, unfortunately the information in newspapers does not always have an objective point of view. Like a historiography, newspapers reflect writers’ or editors’ own point of view on events, and sometimes that point of view is biased. Because there are many different countries in the world that have different cultures and political backgrounds, there can be different perspectives on the same issue among various countries worldwide. In this paper, I will analyze five articles from different countries, Japan, China, the United States, South Korea, and France. The articles are about those countries’ reactions and opinion toward the announcement of North Korea’s return to the six-party talks. By analyzing these five countries’ newspaper articles, we can see how different cultures and political backgrounds cause the same event to be delivered differently.
    Daily Yomiuri/the Yomiuri Shimbun, the newspaper from Japan, states that North Korea must return to the six-party talks, and that China has to take the responsibility to persuade North Korea to make this decision. The Daily Yomiuri article mentions a meeting between the Chinese leader Wen Jiabao and the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, stating, “Kim indicated North Korea was prepared to attend multilateral talks, including the six-party talks, depending on progress in its negotiations with the United States (Daily Yomiuri, Oct. 7, 2009).” According to analysis, the change in North Korea’s position is because North Korea wants to receive economic...