Preamble

Over the last few months, we’ve been concentrating on the consumption of Korean media, like music and screen media, outside of Korea as part of the K-Wave as well as the consumers themselves. This month will be quite different in that we will be looking at the appearance of the K-Wave in English-language news media, specifically, in The Guardian between 2000 and 2023. We’ll also compare this with another Korea-related topic that looms large in the English-speaking world: North Korea.

The Data

The data comes from The Guardian Open Platform. Using R and a convenient wrapper for accessing the API, we first looked for all of the tags that featured the word ‘Korea’. This revealed that there was no single tag devoted to the K-Wave, so we created a dataset of everything tagged “world/south-korea”.

From this we extracted just the articles. As our topic of interest is the K-Wave, a term not coined until the late 1990s, we chose to restrict ourselves to the articles with a publication date later than the turn of the millennium. We ended up, then, with a total of 2069 articles published over that time span.

While the texts of the articles are no doubt worth exploring themselves, for the time being we are restricting ourselves to looking at the tags. Given the absence of a “K-Wave” tag, we came up with a bespoke list of tags which which should indicate that the articles have some K-Wave content. A list of tags found exploring The Guardian’s catalogue of tags and searching for some specific K-Wave related phrases (e.g., “K-beauty”, “Blackpink”, “K-food”, etc.), was as follows (in no particular order):

Given that not all of these tags could have been used throughout the whole surveyed period (e.g., BTS debuted only in 2013, Parasite was released only in 2020, etc.), we chose to use the top-level tags, that is the words that appear before the oblique, as our final list of K-Wave tags as they reflect the broadest possible interpretation of many of the K-prefixed manifestations of the K-Wave, for example K-food, K-beauty, or K-drama. It must be acknowledged, though, that this makes it possible for articles which are not directly related to the K-Wave being included. Overall, though, this choice should allow the articles to reflect and appearance of Korean popular culture in The Guardian, and the amount of coverage devoted to it, with more sensitivity than the more restrictive and specific tags.

We take these tags co-occurring the tag “world/south-korea” to indicate articles with some K-Wave content. As a newspaper with a general readership, and one that is published in UK, US, and Australian editions, looking at this kind of co-occurrence of Guardian articles’ tags, we get some insight into the change in international presence of the K-Wave as the cultural phenomenon becomes a matter of public and press interest. As well as this, it provides an indication of the role the K-Wave plays in constructing the image of South Korea in the wider Anglosphere.

Contrasting this with the articles drawn from our collection of those tagged “world/south-korea” that are also tagged with “world/north-korea” will provide some valuable additional context for understanding the K-Wave, in terms of both public interest and the construction of South Korea in the wider Anglosphere, from the perspective of those who are not singularly focused on it, either as researchers or fans (or, indeed, acafans).

Articles Tagged for the K-Wave

We first turn to the raw number of articles tagged for South Korea and one of our list of K-Wave related tags broken down by year from 2000 to 2023. Over this surveyed period, there were 13 years in which fewer than 10 articles tagged for K-Wave content were published, including 5 with none at all. In fact, the number of relevant articles published in a year peaked at only 40 in 2020, notably one of the years in which a particularly large number of articles (203) devoted to South Korea were published. A summary visualisation of the number of articles tagged for K-Wave content among those tagged for South Korea published each year can be seen below.

While this gives us some indication of the growth of interest in the K-Wave, looking at the number of K-Wave related articles as a proportion of South Korea tagged articles will give us better insight into the role of the K-Wave in constructing the image of the country in the English-speaking world. This is visualised below.

In both of the above visualisations, we can see that between 2000 and 2010, it was not uncommon for a year to pass without any articles being tagged for topics related to the K-Wave. Since then, however, not only has the absolute number of articles focusing on South Korea been trending upwards, but the number of those tagged for K-Wave related topics has, too. Furthermore, while now routinely making up around a quarter of the coverage of South Korea, these K-Wave tagged articles peaked as a proportion of articles tagged for South Korea in 2021 and attract proportionately more interest than they did in the earlier years of our surveyed period.

Articles Tagged for the DPRK

Again, we look at the raw number of articles first. There are articles tagged for both South Korea and North Korea in every year of the surveyed period. The minimum number of articles for which these tags co-occur was 2001 (4 articles) while the largest number of articles to be published with these tags in a single year was 146 in 2018. A summary visualisation of the co-occurrences of these tags broken down by year can be seen below.

Turning our attention to the proportions of articles tagged for both South and North Korea, there were 8 years in which more than half the articles published tagged for South Korea were also tagged for North Korea. This, as well as the sudden and extreme reduction in the proportion of articles tagged for both countries from the year 2019, can be seen in the visualisation below.

Conclusion

From the foregoing it is clear that the amount of coverage topics related to the K-Wave have received in The Guardian, in both absolute terms and as a proportion of the coverage of South Korea, has increased over the course of the early twenty first century. What’s more, since 2019, the absolute number and proportion of articles on South Korea which are tagged for K-Wave content have both been greater than those of articles tagged for North Korea related content. The obvious conclusion to draw is that the increased engagement with Korean popular culture which constitutes the K-Wave as it manifests in in the English-speaking world is reflected in The Guardian’s coverage.

The change in the number and proportion of articles tagged for North Korea from 2019 also invites comment. Although it must remain speculative for the time being, the fact that articles tagged for K-Wave topics now make up a greater proportion of the coverage of South Korea in The Guardian than articles tagged for North Korea is suggestive not only of a waning public interest in North Korea, but a realignment of the cultural conceptualisation of South Korea. Rather than appearing in the public imagination primarily in relation to the DPRK (North Korea) and its twentieth century history of conflict and division, the ROK (South Korea) is now seen through the lens of its contemporary (pop-)cultural output. Time will tell how long or whether this balance of coverage will persist. To develop this work, it may be instructive, if at all possible, to compare this with the coverage of the K-Wave in East Asia or South Asia, where the phenomenon took off earlier. This would allow us to determine whether the pattern of coverage observed here is characteristic of global responses to the K-Wave or particular to the Anglosphere.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Core University Program for Korean Studies of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and Korean Studies Promotion Service at the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS-2021-OLU-2250004)