Polarized embrace: South Korean media coverage of human rights, 1990–2016

Past studies of human rights discourse have centralized civil and political rights over other types of rights, and have thus yielded a biased understanding of how human rights have evolved. This scholarship has also neglected the role of the political slant of reporting agencies in framing topics and issues covering human rights. This study offers new theoretical and analytical solutions to such limits by analyzing a newly compiled data corpus comprising 101,689 South Korean newspaper articles—both right- and left-leaning—referencing the term “human rights.” The analysis of the data led us to reach three conclusions. First, South Korean media coverage demonstrates that human rights as a cultural symbol expanded tremendously in the country during the 1990s and 2000s. Second, there was an a significant degree of shift among multiple categories and topics of human rights during 26 years of that period. Initially, civil and political rights dominated, but then gradually receded as economic, social, cultural, and social minority rights moved to the forefront. Third, we found substantial variation in categories and topics of attention between conservative and progressive news sources; that is, progressive news sources allocated substantially more discussion to diverse categories and topics than their conservative counterparts. These core findings lend support to imagery of a polarized embrace in which human rights are diffused yet in a highly polarized manner.