The Virginia Tech Tragedy: The South Korean Press as an Agent of Cultural Repair.

Our study examines South Korea's response to the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech University on April 16, 2007. Drawing upon frameworks of image restoration from crisis communication literature and cultural repair from media studies, we examine the South Korean community's efforts to repair a threatened cultural image. The paper explicates the cultural repair process by drawing upon Benoit's (1995) framework of image restoration strategies and extending the framework to account for cultural crises. We conceptualize cultural repair as a society's attempt to restore its reputation, image, and legitimacy in the wake of a crisis. We examine media coverage in two leading South Korean publications, The Korea Times and Chosun Ilbo, to discern dominant crisis response strategies and advance implications for cultural crisis management. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]