Conservative Journalists’ Myth Making in South Korea: Use of the Past in News Coverage of the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil

Abstract

This article explores the role of three conservative newspapers in South Korea as storytellers that create and maintain the collective memory of Korean conservatives through textual analysis of news stories on one particular recent event, the 2008 Korean Candlelight Vigil. Several protests since the 1980s in which the democratic-progressives were a leading force have been used as a source of historical analogies that have helped conservative journalists to interpret contemporary events and issues, including the 2008 vigil. These past protests were framed as anti-American, pro-North Korean leftist actions in the news stories. Some aspects of these past events were omitted – for example, former democratic-progressive activists’ contribution to the democratisation process – while other aspects were emphasised, notably the violent nature of the earlier generation of activists. In addition, conservative journalists constructed a revisionist version of one particular past protest, the 2002 Korean Candlelight Vigil, and used it to serve present political purposes, conflating the rhetoric and language of the earlier protests into their reporting of the current protest. These discourse strategies helped to incorporate the current protest into a larger discourse of “the threat posed by the leftists”, which is embedded in the collective memory of Korean conservatives.

Keywords:

• Collective memory
• memory project
• Korean conservatives
• Korean journalism
• South Korea
• BSE
• Mad Cow Disease
• Sunshine Policy

Notes

1. In South Korea, those who favour progress or reform, particularly in political matters, are referred to in a variety of ways, including progressives (jinbo), democrats (minju), pro-North Koreans, leftists, Reds and democratic-progressives (minju jinbo). I use “democratic-progressives” because the 2008 vigil protesters identified themselves as democratic-progressives (Cho, 2009).

2. Coined in the 1990s, the term “386 generation” refers to those who were in their 30s, entered university in the 1980s, and were born in the 1960s.

3. The mission of the People’s Solidarity for Social Progress (PSSP) is “(re)constructing revolutionary social justice thought and theory, searching for internationally-based people’s alternatives to neoliberalism’s financial and armed globalisation, and reforming and revitalising the workers and women’s movements” (People’s Solidarity for Social Progress, 2015).