The Asymmetry in Economic News Coverage and its Impact on Public Perception in South Korea

Abstract

The news media's ‘surveillance’ (Lasswell, 1960) of the economy has been a matter of concern in U.S communication research. Previous studies found that news media tended to be skewed toward negative news (Wattenberg, 1984; Harrington, 1989). Furthermore, studies found that public perception of the economy was closely associated with the news media's economic coverage (Blood & Phillips, 1995; Goidel & Langley, 1995; Hester & Gibson, 2003; Wu, Stevenson, Chen, & Güner, 2002). This study examines whether negatively skewed economic news coverage and its influences on public perception of the economy can be demonstrated in South Korea. For more than 25 years, most economic communication studies have been conducted in the USA. Recently, the triple relationships between the economy, its coverage in the news, and public perception of the economy have also been studied in Japan (Wu, McCracken, & Saito, 2004) and Britain (Soroka, 2006). The current investigation will give some empirical knowledge on whether the news media's negatively skewed coverage and its impact on public perception of the economy also appear in a non-western society that has seen a history of a rapid economic growth, South Korea. The country has risen to become the 12th largest economy in the world in 2006.