The Korea Herald
Author: M.U.
Hello!! In this blog post today, we will be sharing our data results from the conservative newspaper from South Korea, “The Korea Herald”. The coder for this article was M.U. (primary coder) and Wenzhu Chen (secondary coder).
About “The Korea Herald”
“The Korea Herald” is South Korea’s largest English-language newspaper in South Korea that was founded in 1953. (The Korea Herald, n.d.). The Korea Herald is marked as a conservative newspaper published, we decided to explore the newspaper’s proposition on the issue of the Fukushima nuclear water plant issue.
Recap of the evaluation method
As a recap from the introductory blog post, we collected the newspaper through the database Factiva using the search terms “nuclear”, “water”, and “Fukushima”. Using the articles gathered from Factiva, the primary coder sectioned the article to code. Once the coding was completed by the primary coder, the non-coded sheet was handed over to the secondary coder. Once we both had our codings done, we revised them together to see the accuracy of our codings. When we revised the coding, there were several articles that we highly disagreed with. For those articles, we once again talked with each other and discussed/ revised the coding until we agreed upon it. After the agreement, we were able to obtain an average of 93.3% accuracy in a total of 23 articles.
Evaluation
The number of articles published by The Korea Herald relating to the Fukushima nuclear water release totaled 23 articles. The Korea Herald published multiple times the UK and Fox News published. The difference in the number of publications can be predicted that compared to the US and the UK, the issue of water release is relevant to Korea, as it is a neighboring country of Japan.
Before starting the coding project, we predicted that Korean newspapers will be negative towards the water waste issue because they are close to Japan and have a high potential of getting affected by the released water. However, as we continued to examine the articles released by The Korea Herald, 18 out of 23 articles were neutral and the rest of the 5 were negative. In other words, there was no positive article out of the 23 articles.
The topic of the articles was divided into three major categories. The first was about domestic political standpoints. In these articles, the details were on the perspectives of the political parties and the view politicians from the political party hold. The second category was about the investigation methods the country will hold against the release of the water and the components inside the water. Finally, the third topic was on the views citizen hold on seafood and how seafood importation/ consumption are affected.
Out of the three major categories, the topics regarding the political standpoint and the investigation method were coded as neutral because as our group defined our codings, those topics are not to be marked either positive or negative. After all, it is not a topic directly related to the perspective of the water release itself, but rather on its self-interest topics. Therefore, we considered those news articles as neutral articles and rated the articles relating to the views on seafood consumption and how the importing bans are implemented in the country as negative articles.
Overall
Overall, the prediction we made before our evaluation proved to be correct to some extent but incorrect. The articles published by The Korea Herald were neutral on average but leaned stronger on the negative perspective.
Thank you for reading!! See you in other sections!
References
The Korea Herald. (n.d.) About us. | The Korea Heralds http://company.heraldcorp.com/intro.php?lang=eng
