한국 신문의 공정성에 대한 고찰: 미디어관련법 개정보도에 대한 프레임 분석을 중심으로

This study examined the degree of fairness of Korean major daily newspapers on their coverage of the media law amendment, which was directly connected to their own interests. To avoid conceptual confusions and fundamental assumptions of fairness, we employed diversity as an alternative and practical concept in our analysis. We chose four major dailies(Chosun, JoongAng, Kyunghyang and Hankyoreh) as our research objects, according to their political orientations and stances, and content-analyzed their diversity in terms of main themes, tones, and sources. In addition, the study compared differences in news frames among the dailies using both the deductive and inductive frame analysis methods. The results showed that there were statistically very significant differences in news frames dealing with the controversial issue, owing to their dailies’ own interests or ideological stances. We also found considerable differences in narrative construction patterns and contexts among the newspapers which shared similar economic interests or ideological positions. Consequently, the study seems to suggest that Korean newspapers were far from the ideal journalism and accordingly should put forth much more efforts to handle this kind of social conflict issue impartially and objectively. However, it needs to further and elaborate the range of comparison studies on media frames to justify this suggestion.