The rapid pace of improving relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China during the late 1970s has been well scrutinized by mass media scholars, but most of the research has focused on the press coverage emanating from the United States, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan, the major nations involved in normalization. A study examined how the press of the Republic of Korea (ROK, South Korea) and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea) reported Sino-United States normalization during 1978 and 1979 through six critical events related to Sino-U.S. normalization in two leading daily newspapers of the ROK and the official party press organ of the DPRK (272 news stories were examined in all). Results showed that (1) only one story involving Sino-United States normalization appeared in the DPRK press, suggesting evidence for the "delaying hypothesis"; (2) more than a quarter of the normalization stories in the ROK press linked normalization to inter-Korean affairs; (3) there was some evidence suggesting that the ROK press reported normalization in a manner that promoted peace and understanding; and (4) normalization stories involving Korean affairs contained more "mixed" stories (with both positive and negative assertions) than those not involving Korean affairs, suggesting that when the ROK press linked this ambiguous external event to internal affairs it did so in an informative manner that weighed the positive and negative consequences of normalization on Korean affairs. (Three tables of data are included, and 83 references are appended.) (MS)