This study examines the relationships between referring expressions and their referents in English and Korean language. Using the Accessibility as well as the Givenness frameworks (Ariel, 1991, 1994; Gundel et al., 1993), this study investigates the distribution of the referring expressions in each language and how they are related to the framework. Unlike most languages, in Korean, third-person pronouns are rarely used and definite constructions are not used, with the absence of definite and indefinite articles. With these differences in mind, this study aims to examine whether the framework of Gundel et al. (1993) bears its universality to account for the actual use of the distant languages such as English and Korean. Following Mulkern (1996) and Lee (2010), this study restricts its data in political news media discourse from the contrastive perspective. The data consists of ten English political news articles and twenty Korean political news articles published in 2017. The result confirms that both languages follow the general convention of news discourse to introduce a new entity with full names and prefer family names in subsequent mentions. However, further investigation is needed in terms of the use of pronouns in Korean because the distribution from this study differs from Lee's (2010).More contrastive research on different languages in different discourse contexts would shed more light on the universality of the Accessibility and Givenness frameworks.