Conflict and responsibility: Content analysis of American news media organizations’ framing of North Korea

Abstract

This article features a content analysis of the entire corpus of news articles published about North and South Korea by five major American news websites in 2016. It provides an insight into the multiple and contradictory ways in which North Korea is framed by the American news media. The study finds that responsibility for the ongoing crisis on the peninsula is attributed to a small number of actors and that attribution of responsibility, as well as intensity of coverage, differs significantly among news agencies. Cable news was found to focus on conflict to a greater degree than non-cable outlets, and online-only news sites were found to focus more on Kim Jong-un individually. The article qualitatively addresses these differences in coverage and discusses their implications.