“A country that is spoken about a lot, but of which we have little knowledge”

Abstract

North Korea is considered to be the most isolated country in the world, yet it appears as if we all know something about it (Kang & Watts, 2012). In cases like North Korea, national images are primarily influenced by the media (Choi, 2010). The purpose of this study was to examine how North Korea is represented in two British newspapers (the Times & the Guardian) and two Dutch newspapers (de Volkskrant & NRC Handelsblad) in the two weeks after the 6th nuclear test in 2017. For the analysis of the newspapers, a method based on notions from functional pragmatics was applied. Functional pragmatics is a theoretical approach that views language as a means to act with a societal goal (Ehlich, Rehbein, & Ten Thije, 1993). Through a knowledge transfer, newspapers can influence and construct our reality about national images. To reveal this process, the underlying level of language needs to be retrieved (Vierbergen-Schuit & Ten Thije, 2008). Knowledge structures (i.e. collections of information about a topic) are part of the underlying level of language. These were retrieved by identifying and categorizing attributes (i.e. grammatical categories of adjectives). Categorization was done with the help of four assessors. The knowledge structures retrieved from British newspapers were: ‘threat’, ‘poor’, ‘isolated’, ‘tied with China’ and ‘nefarious’, the knowledge structures retrieved from Dutch newspapers were: ‘threat’, ‘nuclear threat’, ‘illegal’, ‘isolated’ and ‘violating human rights’. More attributes were found in British newspapers (n=93), compared to Dutch newspapers (n=30). This seems to be caused by the British liberal media system in which newspapers emphasize conflict and negativity (Vliegenthart, Boomgaarden, & Boumans, 2011). Regardless of these differences, the results showed that North Korea is predominantly represented with negative associations in both countries. These findings are similar to North Korean representations in American newspapers (Kim, 2014; Choi, 2010). Representations in British newspapers showed a degree of similarity with the representations of Shim & Nabers (2012) who found that North Korea is often portrayed in opposing terms (i.e. weak, strong, rational, irrational), but these representations were not found in Dutch newspapers. The findings of this study reinforces Bar-Tal’s (1997) belief that past wars and hostility have a cumulative impact on the present intergroup relations and that this echoes in national representations too. These representations are resistant to change once formed. Limitations of this study refer to the subjective aspects of the method, which requires the researcher to identify and select attributes. Furthermore, it was found that the method works best with a substantial corpus, because a small number of attributes does not activate prior knowledge.