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Framing the Arab Spring: Partisanship in the news stories of Korean Newspapers

This study explored how the Arab Spring coverage by South Korean newspapers was influenced by the ideological orientations of those newspapers. Employing quantitative content analysis of the news stories, it compared the coverage by two major conservative papers (The Chosun Daily and The Joongang Daily) and two major liberal papers (The Hankyoreh Daily and The Kyunghyang Daily). The findings show that the partisanship of these newspapers resulted in divergence of the news framing by the conservative and liberal papers. Specifically, the liberal papers tended to present the Arab uprisings as being due to economic insecurity, including factors such as poverty, unemployment, and income inequality—more frequently than did the conservative papers. They were also somewhat critical of the U.S.’s role in the Middle East as being a facilitator of the Arab dictatorships. In contrast, the conservative papers put an emphasis on the possible impact of the Arab Spring on democratic movements in countries such as North Korea or China. This tendency may have originated from the conservative papers’ support of confrontational foreign policies toward North Korea. This study elaborated on the ‘hierarchy of influence’, in which ideology is a variable at the environmental level, while the partisanship of news outlets is a variable at the organizational level.