Dear Nationalgeographic.com customer service

Hello, I am Jiwoo Park who is a 2^nd grade student in a Korean high school. Nationalgeograhic.com is one of my favorite sites I mostly visit because I could find many interesting and useful information and opinions in many topics, especially on animals. However, I have noticed one report that deals with the long-time territory disputes between Korea and Japan.  It is “Two nations disputed these islands for 300 years” written by Alexandra Genova, in November 14, 2018.  Reading closely from the beginning to the end, I found the writer made a couple of mistakes and seemed to apply dual criteria to each nation’s position and have the third party interviewed who apparently has strong prejudice on this issue.

Let me explain these problems one by one.

The writer made a mistake even at the first sentence of this article by saying “In the middle of the Sea of the Japan” to explain Dokdo’s distance from two nations. Sea of the Japan is very unfair denomination of the sea which is located between Korea and Japan. We Koreans call the sea the East Sea. By calling the name of the sea Sea of the Japan, the writer exposed her inclination to support for Japanese position on this issue, regardless of her consciousness on this denomination.

Second, she compared two nation’s positions by applying two different approaches. For Japanese position, she introduced the comments on the website of the Ministry of the Japanese Foreign Affairs to seemingly provide logical and authoritative evidences to the Japanese claim. They commented that Dokdo is inherently a part of Japanese territory based on historical facts and international law. In contrast, she continued to stress Korean people’s patriotic attitudes toward this issue by interviewing a Korean tourist, a Korean security guard and a resident in Dokdo. This kind of dual approaches have serious risk of danger because it gives impression that Korean people made their claims based only on patriotic sentiments not on the historical facts. It is clearly unbalanced and unfair description of this issue. In the descriptions of the annual event on Dokdo, I feel she might scorn the Korean people by describing crying of the Korean descendant.          

Third, she only interviewed one person as a third party witness who is the photographer of her article. His comments gave me sufficient feeling that he has a strong prejudice on this issue and so is not a neutral and objective person eligible to make any accounts on this issue. He said, “Koreans are very protective….whatever they have” and his other accounts also doesn’t seem objective.

I welcome any reports or columns on this issue because I think they certainly show interest and care on this issue. But I strongly believe the manner of describing this kind of issue should be neutral, equal and balanced based on close review. So, I think this article goes beyond this limit on the reasons above. I sincerely request you to review this article closely and make rational measures.