This study examined how Korean press framed public figures and their scandals by analyzing the coverage of newspapers about the case of what's called '386 politicians drinking spree' and 'Jang Won sexual harassment'. Specifically, this research review...
This study examined how Korean press framed public figures and their scandals by analyzing the coverage of newspapers about the case of what's called '386 politicians drinking spree' and 'Jang Won sexual harassment'. Specifically, this research reviewed how 5 daily newspapers(Chosun, Hankook, Dong-A, Kyunghyang, and Hankyoreh) defined the each case and to what they attributed its responsibility.
To explore these research questions, this study employed content analysis and frame analysis. Especially based on the frame concept of Entman(1993), this study extracted frames, identified a set of news frames, and analyzed their characteristics.
The findings of the study are as follows:
First, Korean press framed public figures' scandals such frames as 'morality', 'authoritative culture', 'civilian responsibility', 'anti-civic movement', and 'petit-heroism'.
'Morality' frame stressed public figures' morality or ethics to be observed. This frame attributed the responsibility of each scandal to morality crisis of the concerned person or social leading people. 'Authoritative culture' frame had its focus on the wrong culture of drinking reception or party. 'Civilian responsibility' frame ascribed the outbreak of scandals to the mistakes of common people who could not scrutinize and control the public figures. 'Anti-civic movement' frame asserted that, first of all, these scandals were attributed to civic groups or civic movements themselves that the public figures, both 386 generation politicians and Jang Won, have based on or belonged to. 'Petit-heroism' frame, which's similarly attributed the scandals' responsibility to individuals rather than system or structure, constructed the vanity and prerogative of public figures as the cause of the scandals.
Second, of the identified 5 frames, 'morality' frame was the most predominant in Korean press' coverage of the scandalous cases, '386 politicians drinking spree' and 'Jang Won sexual harassment'. In terms of each newspaper's news frame, this study revealed that Chosun didn't employ various frames like others, Dong-A, Kyunghyang and Hankook, and had its frame biased to 'morality or ethics crisis'. Especially, Hankook showed the most balanced proportions of the 5 frames. On the other hand, Hankyoreh was found to use 'authoritative culture' frame most, which meant that Hankyoreh, contrary to Chosun, attributed the scandals' responsibility to kind of system or structure rather than individuals' level.