ABSTRACT
Taking a step forward from prior studies which view the candlelight protests in 2016 and 2017 as a movement to push for the transfer of political power, this study pays particular attention to the other conspicuous concern of the protesters: “economic democratization.” To examine how Korea’s conservative news media outlets coped with this concern, this study analyzes their discourse on Samsung, Korea’s largest conglomerate and the top beneficiary of the corrupt Park government’s abuse of power. This study finds that the major conservative media outlets utilize five main storylines to make sense of their views to readers and use key lexical items to flesh out the storylines. It further finds that these storylines and lexical components place value on “economic development,” the ideological symbol that has held economic democratization back for decades. Based on these findings, the author claims that the conservative media outlets, which lit up candles for political democracy, blew out the candles for economic democracy.
