Hold the Suspect! : An Analysis on Media Framing of Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush

Based on the 10.9K articles from top 40 news providers of South Korea, this paper analyzed the media framing of Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush during the first 72 hours after the incident. By adopting word-vector embedding and clustering, we figured out that conservative media focused on political parties' responses and the suspect's identity while the liberal media covered the responsibility of the government and possible unequal spillover effect on the low-income industry workers. Although the social tragedy was not directly connected to institutional politics, the media clearly exhibited political bias in the coverage process.