What’s News: You May Be Getting The Wrong Impression about Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un

There has been A LOT written in the past month about the courtship developing between President Donald Trump and North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un. However, much of that writing follows a track that isn’t consistent with the most widely accepted academic and editorial standpoint about the potential effectiveness of such diplomacy.

Americans getting their Kim Jong Un news online might be familiar with this assessment. Kim Jong Un Is Tricking Donald Trump.

A Grapple textual analysis of the top 150 stories published found that this take was the most preeminent published take, prevalent in 40 percent of content. It did not align with the most robust academic and editorial analysis of the situation.

Our analysis found that this Quartz article was the idelogical median of this cluster of reports. Tim Fernholtz writes:

“Should there be no agreement, there is no face-saving blame to be put on negotiators, and little room left for diplomacy. And while the White House says this meeting is not a negotiation, that only raises the question of what the president is even doing there.”

Another take tracked more closely to the analysis provided by domain experts, international relations thinktanks and the most well funded editorial boards.

That assessment tracked in fewer that 25 percent of articles published on the Trump-Kim meeting indicate that it was possible for the U.S. to use the meeting to secure nuclear concessions.

The analysis pegged this post, by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as the most representative story in the cluster. Findings in the post wove into a more moderate assessment of the meeting than the overwhelmingly negative coverage of many online outlets.

Complete denuclearization is not possible in the meaningful future, and therefore, an immediate suspension of the most worrisome developments followed by a comprehensive verifiable cap is the best realistic option for negotiating a deal with North Korea. It would improve the security of the United States and its allies, deescalate tensions, and provide a tolerable arrangement with North Korea regardless whether full denuclearization is feasible in our lifetime.

This analysis begs a very important question. Why did a smaller number of posts acknowledged this more central assessment if the situatuion. This was not a conservative or apologist projection, but was a perspective echoed by publications that show no favor to the president, including The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Those who relied on printed accounts of the incident had this balanced perspective, but based on our analysis of 150 top search results for news on the Trump-Kim meeting, the majority of online readers saw a much more skewed account of the meeting.

This is the beginning of a series of weekly news analyses powered by Grapple’s natural language processing algorithms. Grapple is building a tool that will be available to professionals intersted in how extreme viewpoints or misinformation materializes in online forums and social media. Visit www.grapple.news for more information.

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