Exploring Report Tendencies of Korean Media on Social Inequality and Unfairness during the COVID-19 Period: A Semantic Network Analysis of Newspaper Articles

This study aims to explore the current status of social inequality and unfairness issues in Korea to which the media devoted attention during the COVID-19 pandemic. We collected 2,069 articles published by 49 media outlets in Korea between January 20, 2020 and November 24, 2020 that satisfied the conditions of "COVID-19 (AND) Inequality (OR) Unfair " and conducted keyword frequency and centrality analysis. We also performed semantic network analysis on 64 main keywords. Semantic network analysis was concurrently conducted with CONCOR analysis for a clear identification of the detailed issues. According to this analysis, the main issues were classified into five types, most of which were related to economic inequality and unfairness. Through this method, we identified issues related to inequality and unfairness in Korean society. We found that news reports focused on the economic sector disprove the notion that there is a relative lack of interest in new types of social inequality.