How News Media Frame Regulatory Conflict in Emerging Industries: Evidence from Structural Topic Modeling of South Korean Press Coverage, 2018–2022

Regulatory reforms in emerging industries require renegotiating the distribution of burdens between incumbents and new entrants, and the news media constitute the principal arena through which the public encounters and evaluates such conflicts. This study examines how regulation-related conflicts are represented in South Korean news media, applying structural topic modeling (STM) to 21,266 articles collected from BigKinds for 2018–2022, the formative period of Korea’s regulatory sandbox and the peak of its mobility-platform disputes. The analysis derives 30 topics and shows that coverage is dominated by announcements of regulatory innovation agendas and new-industry promotion, while concrete processes of conflict resolution are nearly invisible. Resolution-relevant topics declined over the observation period and appeared mainly in regional newspapers and IT–science sections rather than in mainstream national outlets. We interpret this pattern as an invisible middle of regulatory conflict: the media report the outbreak and formal conclusion of disputes, but not the negotiation through which regulatory bargains are reworked. This informational gap deprives governments of the informed public support needed to legitimize negotiated regulatory change, and we draw implications for how regulatory authorities should communicate reform as conflict mediation rather than industrial promotion.