Portrayals of Foreign-Born Residents in South Korean Crime News

While traditional representation studies have examined minorities primarily from the lens of a Western majority, the current study compares how migrants from both developing and advanced countries are portrayed as criminals in the Korean media. Based on content analysis, this study examined how Korean media have covered crime news involving Americans, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and South Asians. An intergroup comparison of the news coverage with actual crime data showed that South Asians were represented most excessively as criminals but the Chinese were least represented in crime news. Narrowing down the coverage of violent crimes revealed a similar pattern among countries. The correlations between the aforementioned patterns of media representation with various economic and social factors, such as trade volume, geographical proximity, and personal contacts, were analyzed to explain the disproportionate misrepresentations of criminals by the group in the news. The practical and theoretical implications of the results for future studies are discussed.