Television News Formats and Constructing the Public Sphere: A Case Study on the Sewol Ferry Disaster

This paper uses four types of television news formats and other variables (news story types, news length, news contents, and news sources) to examine how the public sphere is formed by disaster news today. By using content analysis, news stories aired on seven major broadcasting channels in South Korea were investigated. This paper found that restricted and limited formats comprise the majority of South Korean disaster news. These formats consisted of straight news reports with a short length while extended and expansive news formats used interview reports the most with relatively extensive lengths. Comprehensive programming channels, especially the JTBC channel, presented more open formats portraying various opinions in more depth than terrestrial broadcasting channels. The results of this study also showed that government-related officials and perpetrators functioned more often as news sources in an extended format than in other formats. However, in a limited news format, victims and citizens served more often as news sources than others.