The political economy of media framing in Korea:  An analysis of Korean news coverage of climate change, 1995-2015

Byung Wook Kim

doi:10.17077/etd.005219

The purpose of this study is to understand Korea’s “issue culture” (as a terminology in Gamson and Modigliani’s studies) of climate change, constructed through discourses of climate change in four major newspapers. Theoretically focusing on the constructionist paradigm of media framing and the political economy of global carbon markets, this study examines the Korean newspapers’ ways of responding to global climate change discourse as a process of constructing news frames of and preferred meanings of climate change in Korea. This study specifically interprets this process as a neoliberalization of climate change discourse in Korea. In other words, this study focuses on how commonly shared meanings of environmentalism and nature are structured with other ideas in news texts, how the textual structures have shifted over time, and how these shifts have positioned financial institutions and the market economy as primary agents, making it natural to realize the ‘pricelessness’ of nature as a commodity by privatizing and financializing it. As the ‘price’ of nature becomes natural, environmental issues and solutions as well as corresponding agents become more salient in the news texts when they are financially profitable, and otherwise, they are marginalized. To provide a context of the study, this study reviewed the history of the Korean press in the political economy of Korea. The emergence of a market economy and conglomerates in Korea has been examined based on their relationship with the military dictatorial regimes. As the geo-political importance of Korea in the post-Cold War era changed, the relationship between the regime and conglomerates changed. This struggle for power resulted in the political liberalization (but also economic liberalization) of Korea. In the process of overcoming the 1997 financial crisis in Korea, the political economy of Korea has been hugely restructured centered on global and local conglomerates and financial investors, who have continuously re-oriented the state power for their financial interests. The Korean press needs to be understood in this context even though differences between conservative and progressive newspapers exist. In other words, media framing in Korea is an ideological process of constructing an issue culture that serves the interests of the dominant groups, the global and local investors. Thus, this study attempts to understand the shift of news frames of climate change in the consideration to reveal this ideological process of meaning making surrounding the climate change discourse in Korea. Four worldviews of environmentalism in the global context (Clapp & Dauvergne, 2011) have been conceptualized in the context of different paradigms in the scholarship of international relations. These paradigms differently view the structure of global politics as well as the functions of international organizations, and these differences synthesize well with the four worldviews of environmentalism in the global context. This study conceptualizes media frames as associations of words, and in attempting to understand and discern each media frame based on the words, these four worldviews, associated with the market-liberals, the institutionalists, the bio-environmentalists, and the social greens, are employed. Simply put, media frames are inductively detected by using computer programing and then interpreted based on these four worldviews. Four major Korean newspapers, representing both conservative and progressive views, were selected. Considering the best data availability (i.e., because of different availability of digitized data), the time span of this study is from 1995 to 2015 for conservative newspapers and from 2002 to 2015 for progressive newspapers. A total of 21,423 news articles—4,865,315 words (tokens)—was analyzed. Three techniques in text analytics, which are semantic network analysis, K-means clustering, and LDA topic modeling, each reveal different aspects of the data. In chapter 5, using semantic network analysis, this study reveals frequently used words, defined as “popular keywords,” in the news coverage and their different statuses in the network. This chapter is originally designed to show the semantic structures of news coverage of climate change in each time point (i.e., year), even though this chapter, more than providing me answers to the research questions that this study was originally designed to answer, provides me future tasks to elaborate semantic network analysis as a methodological tool. Thus, initial design of this study had been revised to examine the popular keywords, instead of all words in each time point. Chapter 5 builds semantic networks in different time periods based on frequent words used in the coverage of climate change. The most frequent 44 words in the overall coverage of climate change were selected to build the semantic networks, representing different individual years as well as time periods. Focusing on the changes of centrality of words and weights of edges between words, this study interprets the structure of semantic networks and their changing patterns over time and different patterns between conservative and progressive newspapers. Both conservative and progressive newspapers show semantic networks centered on the words relevant to environment and nature in the early period of time. However, names of countries and terminologies of climate change convention became more important nodes over time, and then words relevant to corporate, industrial, and governmental projects became more important nodes after that. Differences between conservative and progressive newspapers also exist. For instance, in the networks of conservative newspapers, terminologies of climate change convention such as ‘reduction’ and ‘emission’ show higher edge weights with words relevant to economy such as ‘growth.’ However, in progressive newspapers, these terminologies show higher edge weights with words relevant to society such as ‘society’ and ‘human.’ Also, in conservative newspapers, the words relevant to nature such as ‘Earth’ and ‘water’ are located on the peripheries of the network while the words relevant to economy such as ‘corporation,’ ‘industry,’ and ‘economy’ are located on the center of the networks. This was opposite in progressive newspapers. In chapter 6, using K-means clustering, this study reveals the differences (or shifts) of the uses of media frames of climate change over time. Because of the characteristics of K-means clustering—detecting mutually exclusive topics from each news article—K-means clustering is used for statistical analyses. Each topic (i.e., association of words conceptualized as a media frame) is labeled to each news article, and frequencies of each news frame in different time points are compared. In both conservative and progressive newspapers, the worldviews associated with the market liberals and the institutionalists have increased over time, and their counterparts, the worldviews associated with the bio-environmentalists and the social greens have decreased over time. In chapter 7, this study detects media frames, using LDA topic modeling. This analytical approach has some advantages, compared to K-means clustering, because it detects topics by considering the contexts in which each word is used. In other words, the calculation process to detect topics is not simply a calculation of the word used together with other words in the same document, but how probable each word will be to construct a topic, given that other words in the same document construct the same topic. Therefore, LDA topic modeling yields the results as percentages of multiple topics per document, which may not be suitable for statistical analyses but can be useful to find the representative documents for each topic. In other words, based on the percentage of each topic included in each news article, this study detects ten representative news articles of the topics. In addition to explaining the structure of syntactic elements for topics as well as semantic similarities among topics, this study conducts a thematic analysis on the representative news articles to reveal the meaning each topic produces. This study differentiates pools of data (i.e., “bags of words”) by distinguish time periods. LDA topic modeling calculates the probabilities of words to topic, given documents (i.e., contexts) on the same topic, and therefore, the computer would yield different topics when the pools of data change. By examining what remains, what emerges, and what vanishes as the data pool changes, this study attempts to explain and understand the process of meaning construction. Then the process is explained based on the constructionist paradigm of media framing to understand institutional and capitalistic ideologies produced from the process. Chapter 7 of this study shows that the neoliberalization of climate change discourse has occurred both in conservative and progressive newspapers in Korea, even though the processes in them are different. Korea’s conservative newspapers actively locate climate change discourse close to market-oriented discourses, emphasizing the roles of financial institutions, analysts, corporations, and industry leaders. In this process, the “traditional” concerns of environmentalism including biodiversity, ecosystems, habitat losses and changes, campaigns to reduce energy consumptions, lives in the Global South, and reckless developmental projects, have not constructed any independent topic in conservative newspapers. Interestingly, conservative newspapers show a process of packaging the neoliberal ideas and relevant actors (i.e., governmental and financial) into a label of the so-called ‘Green Knowledge.’ The green knowledge, clearly distancing the “new” ideas from the “traditional” ideas, has functioned to legitimize market-oriented ideas and construct itself as the only and dominant theme of Korea’s climate change discourse. Unlike conservative newspapers, progressive newspapers focused on criticisms of capitalism and modernity in general and covered various issues of climate change ranging from habitat losses and changes and public campaigns of environmental groups to water scarcity issues in the Global South. However, since the year 2008, the issues in progressive newspapers have converged into global conventions of climate change and governmental actors. As a result, those issues that had constructed separate topics before the year 2008 disappeared after the year 2008. In regard to progressive newspapers, this study focuses on this process. The newly constructed themes, centered on global convention, have functioned to quantify as well as financialize nature as well as the climate change discourse in Korea. Specifically, in the process of distinguishing ‘good’ and ‘bad’ money, corporations, institutions, and countries, governmental, financial, and corporate actors are emphasized, and other actors including environmental groups and their roles in climate change discourse have been marginalized.

The political economy of media framing in Korea: An analysis of Korean news coverage of climate change, 1995-2015

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Details

Metrics