A study on the representation of victims in media discourse on the trauma of the Sewol ferry disaster

Heeseon Kim

Chonnam National University

Abstract

This study examines how trauma victims of the Sewol Ferry disaster were selectively represented in the Chosun Ilbo, a major conservative daily newspaper in South Korea. Using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, it analyzes 44 news texts collected from 2014 to 2024, focusing on the strategies of naming, grammatical choice, and intertextuality. The findings show that the coverage consistently foregrounded “Danwon High School students” as the central symbol of public grief, while ordinary passengers, divers, rescue workers, and surviving families were often marginalized or depicted only in functional roles. Such discursive practices created implicit hierarchies of suffering in which some victims’ pain was recognized and remembered, while others were backgrounded or forgotten. Moreover, the reports frequently reframed trauma through psychological or medical discourse, reducing it to treatment and recovery, and diverting attention away from questions of structural responsibility. Intertextual links with later disasters, such as the Itaewon crowd crush, further recontextualized Sewol as part of generational trauma and collective memory. These results suggest that trauma recovery is not merely an individual or clinical matter but also shaped by how victims are socially represented and emotionally positioned within public discourse.

‘세월호 참사 트라우마’ 언론 보도에 나타난 피해자 재현 양상 연구

초록

Vol. 40 No. 4 (2022.12)

Journal Abbreviation j. Korea Saf. Manag. Sci.
Frequency Published four times annually in March, June, September, and December
Doi Prefix 10.14353/sjk.
Year of Launching 1993
Publisher The Sociolinguistic Society of Korea

Indexed/Tracked/Covered By