ScholarWorks@중앙대학교

초록

This study investigates the ongoing crisis in journalism by examining how the term ‘Giregi,’ a derogative term for journalists who produce low quality news contents, has been deployed to attack journalists in South Korea. While there are shared concerns among academics and the news industry alike over the increasing public distrust towards journalism, no systematic investigation has been conducted to explore how news users use the term ‘Giregi’ to express their distrust and hatred towards journalists. For this reason, we examine a total of 592,920 user comments containing the term from the comments section of 416,800 news articles published between 2013 and 2019 in Naver, the most popular news platform in Korea. The results show that there has been an uptick in usage of the derogative term since 2013. However, contrary to popular notions about the term, it was found that news users are most likely to use the term to criticize news articles covering economics rather than politics. Yet, we also found that it was in political news that the number of comments containing the term ‘Giregi’ had shown the most increase during the period studied. Our findings imply that increasing distrust towards journalists and news media in general may explain the ‘Giregi’ phenomenon.

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