This study examined the discourse of Farmers’ Weekly, a newspaper published by public information organization of the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), using text mining techniques. For this purpose, word frequency analysis, LDA topic modeling, bi-gram network analysis, and time series analysis were conducted on 1,913 articles from 98 issues. Word frequency analysis showed that words related to public information activities of USAMGIK, political situation, and food shortage issues appeared on the top of the list. Topic modeling resulted in 10 topics, including “Improving Education and Living Conditions”, “Enlightening Farmers”, “Rice Collection”, “World News”, “Political Propaganda”, “Rural Life”, “Increase in Food Production”, “Democracy”, “Promotion of USAMGIK Policies”, and “Farmer Instructions”.
Time series analysis shows that the topics related political propaganda increased to promote the General Election after 1948, while the other topics were covered relatively less. The topics of Farmers’ Weekly were evenly distributed in fi ve areas: political, economic, social, cultural, and international, covering a wide range of topics without being biased toward any specifi c area. In particular, enlightening and entertaining serial articles on page 4 showed that Farmers’ Weekly tried to attract people’s attention in rural areas with poor media dissemination so that it could serve as a practical press or media. Th is suggests that Farmers’ Weekly has a literature value that can trace the social situation of US Military period. In Farmers’ Weekly, which was mainly recognized as a propaganda and education medium in previous studies, public information activities for stable occupation and political propaganda for transplanting democracy and suppressing communism appeared, and “Spreading American Culture” was not revealed among the types of public information activities of USAMGIK. In addition, by examining the agricultural policies revealed in Farmers’ Weekly, it was found that USAMGIK was passive in reforming the agricultural structure of Korea and mainly aimed at solving short-term food problems.