This study examines how victims are linguistically represented in trauma-related news coverage following the Sewol Ferry disaster, drawing on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The analysis focuses on trauma reports published by Chosu...
This study examines how victims are linguistically represented in trauma-related news coverage following the Sewol Ferry disaster, drawing on the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The analysis focuses on trauma reports published by Chosun Ilbo and Kyunghyang Shinmun from 2014 to 2025. Using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, the study integrates analyses at the levels of textual practice, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice.
At the level of textual practice, particular attention is paid to nomination and predication strategies in order to examine how victims are positioned within sentence structures. While both newspapers portray the Sewol disaster as a collective shock and a source of psychological suffering, differences emerge in the grammatical and semantic roles assigned to victims. In Chosun Ilbo, victims tend to appear as recipients of support, care, or intervention, or as entities affected by the consequences of the event.
Material and verbal processes are predominant, often mediated through expert explanations. In contrast, Kyunghyang Shinmun more frequently represents victims as subjects of emotion, speech, and social action, employing relational and mental processes that foreground lived experience and memory as sources of meaning.
At the level of discursive practice, the two newspapers differ in their quotation practices and intertextual strategies. Chosun Ilbo relies primarily on expert and institutional discourse, framing trauma as a condition to be managed and treated through professional and governmental systems. This strategy emphasizes stability, recovery, and social order. By contrast, Kyunghyang Shinmun extensively incorporates the voices of victims and citizens, recontextualizing personal testimonies as public discourse. Through this practice, trauma is constructed not merely as a psychological condition but as a social experience that calls for collective interpretation and response.
These discursive patterns are linked to divergent ideological orientations at the level of sociocultural practice. The coverage in Chosun Ilbo tends to reinforce an ideology of state responsibility framed in terms of post- disaster management, alongside a tendency toward the medicalization of trauma. Social conflict and accountability are relatively backgrounded. In contrast, Kyunghyang Shinmun situates trauma within discourses of justice, responsibility, memory, and solidarity, positioning victims as agents who articulate social questions and demands for change. This contrast reflects a form of hegemonic negotiation over how disaster-related suffering should be understood and remembered in society.
This study demonstrates that disaster reporting is not a neutral act of information delivery but a discursive practice that shapes social perceptions, moral values, and collective memory. By highlighting the limits of representations that confine victims to objects of care or treatment, the study underscores the ethical importance of rearticulating victims as relational subjects and active bearers of memory in post-disaster discourse.
Keywords: Sewol Ferry Disaster, Trauma Reporting, Victim Representation, Critical Discourse Analysis, Nomination, Predication, Discursive Practice, Sociocultural Practice