ABSTRACT This study examines how media agendas surrounding the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster evolved over a ten‐year period and how agenda prevalence differed by media ideology. To address these questions, the study analyzes 51,572 news articles published between 2014 and 2024 in five major South Korean daily newspapers, using Structural Topic Modelling (STM), hierarchical clustering, longitudinal time‐trend analysis, and comparisons between conservative and progressive outlets. Five key agendas were identified: truth‐seeking and healing, value conflict, investigation and incident response, political conflict and responsibility, and media representation and public opinion formation. The political conflict and responsibility agenda was the most prevalent, accounting for 32.6% of overall agenda prevalence, and increased over time. While ideological differences in the media representation and public opinion formation agenda were initially minimal, this agenda increased more clearly in progressive media, whereas conservative media remained relatively stable. In contrast, the political conflict and responsibility agenda exhibited greater growth in conservative media over time. These findings indicate that media agendas surrounding the disaster became systematically differentiated along ideological lines over the decade, offering an empirical basis for interpreting how cultural memory—understood here as shared knowledge of the past continuously reconstructed through the media—may be organised differently across media contexts.
Seungkyung Ham (Thu,) studied this question.