Data Dualism in polarized media: Ideological framing of personal data discourse in South Korea through MyData coverage

How do polarized media systems shape the mediated discourse through which data governance is publicly represented? As societies worldwide navigate the tensions between digital innovation and individual rights, media framing emerges as a critical mechanism for constructing competing technological imaginaries. This study theorizes “ Data Dualism ”—the discursive bifurcation of personal data governance into either market opportunity or rights protection—through an analysis of MyData coverage in South Korean media from 2017 to 2024 (retrieved N = 22,188; analyzed N = 21,256 after preprocessing). Utilizing Latent Dirichlet Allocation and semantic network analysis, we identify systematic asymmetries across media types and ideological orientations. Among the dominant topics, market-oriented outlets, including economic newspapers, IT media, and online news, predominantly employ “digital innovation” frames (14.8–32.3%). In contrast, comprehensive dailies emphasize “data rights” (15.4%) and “responsibility” (25.2%). Notably, while a digital innovation frame is broadly shared across the ideological spectrum, ideological orientation differentiates how outlets inflect this shared discourse: conservative newspapers draw more on conflict and responsibility frames, with responsibility frames accounting for 43.0% in JoongAng Ilbo, whereas progressive outlets foreground morality and human interest. Data Dualism thus operates most clearly across media types and more subtly across ideological lines, framing data governance as either an economic imperative or an ethical dilemma. These findings extend framing theory beyond political discourse by showing how ideological parallelism structures technology-governance discourse. We argue that Data Dualism—potentially observable across polarized democracies—has broader theoretical implications for policy legitimacy insofar as it may fragment public discourse into incompatible normative frameworks.