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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 24, No. 0, pp.1164-1176
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2024
Received 23 Sep 2024 Revised 23 Oct 2024 Accepted 28 Oct 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.24..202410.1164

Discursive News Values Analysis: The Case of COVID-19 Reports in South Korea

Narisara Traiboot ; Krisda Chaemsaithong
(first author) Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities, Division of Korean Chiangmai University 239 Huay Kaew, Rd. Chiang Mai, Thailand
(corresponding author) Professor, English Department Hanyang University 222 Wangsimni Rd. Seoul, South Korea, Tel: 02) 2220-0753 krisda@hanyang.ac.kr


© 2024 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The current project investigates the production of the COVID-19 epidemic into a crisis from the perspective of Discursive News Values Analysis. Based on a corpus of COVID-19 news reports in The Korea Herald from 2023 to 2024, the study explicates what aspects of the pandemic are foregrounded and backgrounded and how lexico-grammatical choices contribute to shaping the way the virus is framed as a threat or a non-issue. The findings reveal that Negativity/Positivity, Proximity/Timeliness and Superlativeness are emphasized, working in concert with other news values to create a never-ending narrative of a threatening pathogen in the coverage. It is argued that, emphasizing these values, the reports provide no helpful information for the reader to reduce health risks and potentially distort the risk perceptions of the virus.

Keywords:

news value, COVID-19, crisis communication, discourse analysis, newspaper report

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-202300000003620)

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