Bringing Different Identities Together: Understanding South Korea’s Media Reform Movement through Journalists’ Dual Identities

• In Event: 2483 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 07. Media and Movements

Abstract

The 2016-2017 political protest in South Korea attracted millions of protesters for six months and achieved its goal—democratic and peaceful impeachment of the corrupted president. During this successful protest, the spotlight was mainly focused on demonstrations and characteristics of the protesters. However, not much attention has been given to journalists of free-to-air and terrestrial broadcasting who are continuing to struggle to normalize the broadcasting system of Korea, which has been infringed upon by the previous administrations. This paper approaches the struggle of journalists through analyzing the identities of journalists—professional and interpretive identities.
Just through exposure to the news reports that tend to mainly manifest professional identity, protesters in South Korea had difficulty in embracing the interpretive identity of journalists during the time of the 2016-17 political protest. The journalistic institutions, also, were actively suppressing the public broadcasting journalists to retain their identity as an interpretive community. Throughout the protest, there was a gap between the journalists’ self-identification of themselves as an interpretive community and external identification of the group as a professional community implementing governmental censorship. Suffering from such identity crisis, public media journalists attempted to reestablish their internal discourse community through active interchanges of narratives and circulated discourse created within their interpretive community with the larger public through the means of media reform movements. The movement was a way of journalists of public broadcasting services facilitating so-called “non-professional” ways of solidifying their sense of commonality, restoring their identity as an interpretive community, and manifesting such identity to both Korean citizens and the journalistic institution.

Author

• Do Eon Lee