The following is an extract from the introduction to the book Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes (2024) by Devan Hawkins.
In the predawn hours of April 3, 1948, rebels assembled on the slopes of Mount Hallasan, a volcano that is located at the center of Jeju Island. On that highest peak in South Korea, the rebels lit fires that were meant to signal the start of armed resistance against both the occupation of South Korea by the United States and in support of the reunification of Korea, which had been divided in half since the end of the World War II. This uprising was preceded by previous incidents in which police fatally fired on protesters.
In a letter sent to residents of the island, the rebels wrote:
Fellow citizens! Respectable parents and siblings! Today, on this day of April 3, your sons, daughters, and little brothers and sisters rose up in arms for the reunification and independence of our homeland, and for the complete liberation of the people. We must risk our lives for the opposition to the betrayal of the country and the unilateral election and government. We rose up in arms against the brutal slaughter done by American cannibals that force you into hardship and unhappiness. To vent your deep-rooted rancor we rouse up in arms. You should defend us who fight for the victory of our country and should rise up along with us, responding to the call of the country and its people.
Over the course of the next day, these rebels would launch attacks on police outposts and on other locations thought to contribute to repression on the island.
This was the beginning of the Jeju Uprising. Following failed negotiations with police, additional troops would be sent to the island to crush the rebellion. During the next several months, periodic fighting would continue between rebels on the island and Korean forces. Following an incident where members of the South Korean military sent to the island mutinied and killed many of their commanders, dictator Syngman Rhee declared martial law. As part of the military’s efforts to end the rebellion, horrific incidents including the destruction of entire villages, mass rape, and the massacre of thousands of civilians occurred. Reports of the number of dead vary significantly from a low of 15,000 to a high of 65,000. The vast majority of civilian deaths were the responsibility of South Korean security forces. Tens of thousands fled from Jeju to Japan to escape the violence. Three hundred villages and tens of thousands of houses were destroyed.
If you were a dedicated reader of The New York Times—the paper which declares on its front page that it publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—during the Jeju Uprising you would know very little about the horrors that transpired on Jeju Island in 1948 and 1949. Using the Times search database, I only identified eight articles that discussed Jeju (then rendered as Cheju) for the entirety of 1948 and 1949. All of these articles were fairly short reports, appearing in the newspaper’s back pages. Many of them focused on the activities of the rebels:
Communists on Cheju Attack Villages—Demand Police Surrender, No Election
Constabulary Chief on Cheju Shot While Sleeping
Snipers Fire at U.S. Plane At Airport in South Korea
As well as alleged involvement by the Soviet Union:
Soviet Submarines Said To Help Reds in Korea
In the last article identified about Jeju, on April 1949, the Times devoted less than 50 words to publishing a United Press report about “1,193 Koreans Slain on Cheju” and the thousands more left homeless. The report makes no mention of responsibility for those dead, despite the fact that the vast majority of civilians were killed by the South Korean military. The number reported as being killed is an underestimate, at least by a factor of ten.
On the same day that last report about Jeju was published by the Times, a story appeared in the Times about the Berlin Airlift, an operation led by the United States and United Kingdom to supply West Berlin (an exclave of the United States-allied West Germany) with supplies after it had been blockaded by the Soviet-allied East Germany, which surrounded it. The period of the blockade and the airlift that followed almost perfectly matched with the period of the Jeju Uprising. During this period, there were over a hundred articles describing the blockade and the airlift that followed, many featured on the front page of the Times.
There are numerous reasons why the Berlin Airlift likely received more attention than the uprising and massacre on Jeju Island. Berlin is located in the center of Europe, while Jeju is a relatively remote island in East Asia. However, a year after the Jeju Uprising when the Chinese Communists captured Hainan, another remote island in East Asia, from the Chinese Nationalists, the Times published dozens of articles about the operation, suggesting that remoteness does not make significant reporting impossible.
Berlin was also seen as the frontline of the Cold War, while in the years before the Korean War, the Korean Peninsula was often treated as a periphery issue. However, during the period of the Jeju Uprising, the Times published hundreds of stories about Korea, many of which focused on infiltration of communists from the north into the south. Furthermore, the United States was already heavily invested in Korea, having occupied the southern half of the peninsula since the end of
World War II. At the time of the uprising, there were thousands of US troops in Korea. Indeed, a report from the South Korean government published decades after the uprising found that the United States shared responsibility for the military operations on Jeju Island.
The role that disregard for non-Europeans might play in the dearth of coverage should also be considered. Jeju Islanders, unlike Berliners, were East Asians and, therefore, potentially less sympathetic in the minds of some readers of the Times. To compare Jeju Island to another contemporaneous issue in Europe, the final operation of the Greek Civil War, which occurred a few months after the conclusion of the Jeju Uprising, received more coverage in one month than the Jeju Uprising received in a whole year. The fact that the Greek Civil War involved Europeans may have been a factor in this higher level of coverage.
There is another possible cause for the general lack of coverage of the Jeju Uprising: geopolitics. Berliners were a sympathetic population who were being oppressed by the new official enemy of the United States—the Soviet Union. In contrast, the people of Jeju Island were the victims of a regime that had been put into place and supported by the United States with the goal of preventing the spread of Soviet-aligned communism.
Stated another way, the people of Berlin were worthy victims and the people of Jeju Island were unworthy victims.
This formulation of Worthy and Unworthy victims was first developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their seminal book Manufacturing Consent. As they wrote:
Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found “worthy” and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage than those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly “unworthy.” Put another way, the media will be more likely to portray the victims of actions of official-state enemies in unfavorable terms, while portraying the victims of allies in more favorable terms.
In the book Herman and Chomsky go on to show how crimes committed in client states of the Soviet Union received far more attention than crimes in client states of the United States. For example, the murder of Catholic Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko “not only received far more coverage than Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in the U.S. client-state El Salvador in 1980; he was given more coverage than the aggregate of one hundred religious victims killed in U.S. client states, although eight of those victims were U.S. citizens.” Herman and Chomsky’s book has been influential in how the US media and Western media are viewed more broadly, with writers like Robert McChesney, John Nicholas, and Alan MacLeod expanding on the work.
This formulation of “Worthy and Unworthy victims” is part of Herman and Chomsky’s larger Propaganda Model, which postulates that “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”
Herman and Chomsky’s argument is compelling and provocative because it argues that despite the fact that media in the United States is not state-run and press freedom is generally protected in the country, the media still serves a similar purpose as it did in the Soviet Union and other countries where media is
predominately state-run and where journalists do not have the same press freedom protections.
To explain their Propaganda Model, Herman and Chomsky proposed that there are five filters that tend to restrict media coverage in Western countries, particularly the United States. These filters are:
Ownership: Media companies are mostly large corporations with the fundamental imperative to make a profit. These companies are disincentivized from covering topics that may threaten their profit.
Advertising: In a similar way, almost all media companies are dependent on advertising for their revenue. Therefore, media companies are also disincentivized from covering topics that may lose them advertisers.
Sourcing: Media outlets frequently use official, government sources for their information. These sources will tend to reflect the biases of the government.
Flak: Individuals who provide dissenting viewpoints will often face concerted campaigns to discredit them. These campaigns will make journalists less likely to decide to cover stories that may result in such flak, including those that may portray allies of the United States in a negative light.
Anti-Communism/Fear: Reporting will often play into the fears of official enemies (Communists during the Cold War, Islamic Terrorism during the War on Terror, etc.). Playing into these fears will often mean that official state enemies will receive more coverage.
Together, these filters create a situation where even in a country, like the United States, with relatively few state controls on the media, reporting will tend to reflect the official standpoint of the government.
This tendency for reporting to reflect the standard positions of the government is seen most powerfully in foreign affairs.
Unlike domestic issues, where there is at least some daylight between the two major parties, with respect to foreign policy there is much less difference in foreign affairs. While the language used and the particular issues emphasized will often be different, the fundamental positions of both Democrats and Republicans do not tend to differ substantially. For example, if you compare each party’s platforms 5,6 before the 2016 election (in 2020 the Republicans did not adopt a new platform, not allowing for a direct comparison) with respect to Venezuela, Iran, Israel, China, and Russia, you generally see only minor differences. This book will try to make the argument that this same general uniformity in political perspectives about foreign affairs is reflected in media coverage in the United States.