The Life Cycle of Newspaper Coverage of a Public Issue: Candlelight Protests against US Beef Imports in South Korea*

This paper applies Downs’s concept of the issue attention cycle and Hilgartner and Bosk’s public arenas model to the competition among social problems for public attention. It draws on the recent controversy in Korea about the import of US beef to test the idea that a major issue has several issues and events related to it, and that this can explain why its life cycle is extended. The beef imports controversy involved one issue (concern about mad-cow disease) and four events (coverage of the disease on the PD Pocketbook TV show, police excess, intimidation of newspaper advertisers, and activity of the People’s Council for Countermeasures against Mad-Cow Disease). Drawing on Hilgartner and Bosk’s work, this study develops an issue competition model and uses it to estimate the decrease in media attention to this controversy. It found that the decrease in media attention resulted from competition from other issues.