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The Bush administration has pursued a new, hard-line approach to the current nuclear standoff with North Korea. In efforts to build public support from the American public as well as from its allies in the region, the Bush administration has carefully framed, in distinctive ways, the nature of the crisis and the grounds for an appropriate response to North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship. To assess the effects of these U.S. messages designed to build public support for its hard-line approach, we conducted a short experimental study in the United States and in South Korea. Our results indicate that many of these messages induce diverging responses in the two countries, implying that the Bush administration's rhetoric designed to build domestic support does not have comparable effects in South Korea.

In recent years, Twitter emerged as an important news driver as most major news organizations now provide newsfeeds via Twitter. We classified 34 South Korean news outlets based on the pattern of co-following among 709,586 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 1,811 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that partisan and generational selectivity sharply polarizes news following on Twitter, suggesting that Twitter is likely to reinforce the existing political divisions in society by reducing the likelihood of chance encounters with the disagreeable views.

With the rise of networked media such as Twitter, celebrities' ability to speak on policy matters directly to the public has become amplified. We investigate the political implications of celebrity activism on Twitter by estimating the political ideology of thirty-four South Korean news outlets and fourteen political celebrities based on the co-following pattern among 1,868,587 Twitter users. We also had a rare opportunity to match their following behavior with individual-level attributes by relying on supplementary survey data on 11,953 members of an online survey panel. Our results reveal that celebrity following on Twitter is ideologically skewed; a vast majority of Korean Twitter users following politically influential celebrities are liberal. Additionally, survey results show that political celebrities are more likely to attract those lacking the ability to process one-sided information in a balanced manner.

This study tests the hypothesis that cross-national differences in public awareness of international affairs are attributable to differences in the supply of international news and citizens' demand for information. Simultaneously, the authors compared the level of news coverage accorded specific "target" subjects in major Swiss and U.S. news organizations and the level of attentiveness to news among Swiss and U.S. citizens. The authors' results revealed that Swiss media provided more hard international news than U.S. media, that Swiss citizens reported higher levels of news exposure, and that the Swiss were also considerably more informed than the Americans on questions of hard news. Using a multilevel model, the authors further demonstrate that the effects of news on knowledge are stronger in Switzerland and that the greater availability of international news has the effect of reducing the knowledge gap between more and less attentive Swiss.