Cross-National News Narratives of the Paralympic Games: Computational Text Analysis of the Media Coverage in the United States and South Korea

Abstract

This study presents a comparison of themes found in the U.S. and South Korean news coverage of the Paralympics. It is commonplace to associate rugged individualism with the former country and collectivism with the latter, and we assumed that these national traits would be apparent in the news coverage of the Paralympic Games in the two countries. Using the keyword “Paralympics,” we searched two decades of newspaper coverage and performed latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling on the articles that the search produced. The results of the modeling confirmed that the reporting in each country reflected its national characteristics, with the U.S. coverage reinforcing ableism and the South Korean coverage focusing on the government’s efforts to promote large-scale sporting events. The news stories in both countries were alike, though, in treating disabled athletes and traditional athletes differently. Part of the contribution of this research to the academic study of disabled athletes is the use of computational textual analysis to address these issues.