Since the conclusion of the nuclear accord in 1994, the United States and North Korea have made a continuous contact through a number of channels. Despite these diplomatic exchanges, it seems that both nations fail to maintain friendly and amicable relations. This raises a significant question of how they see each other. This paper aims at exploring the U.S. image of North Korea and vice-versa through media coverage. To this end, the author adopts the content analysis of news coverage as a way of analyzing effectively the mutual national image between the two nations. More specifically, this work chooses the New York Times and Rodong Shinmoon to investigate North Korea’s image of the U.S.
and vice-versa during the period from October 1994 to October 2004. One of the major findings from our discussion is summed up this way. The American newspaper portrays North Korea as a nation of closeness, unreliable country, describing its society as suffering severe hunger and economic misery. In the meanwhile, the North Korean newspaperattacks the U.S. as a war mongering state, evil empire, and aggressor. Also, this paper does not hesitate to appraise American society as having the racial discrimination, economic disaster, and widespreadviolence. In short, the Rodong Shinmoon deals more with negative news coverage than positive one in the period under review, while the New York Times focuses primarily on straight news coverage. North Korea’s nuclear program has greatly affected the mutual national image and will do unless this issue remains unresolved.