• Korean journal of communication and information
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• v.77
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• pp.73-107
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• 2016

The general programming channels, newly introduced around the beginning of the 2010s, have grown into powerful journalistic agencies, the far-reaching social influences of which are not confined by the economic effects within the South Korean media industry. They are now rendered to become part of major socio-political institutions that try to secure their privileges based on broadcast journalism, and to widen their business opportunities through those special kind of social practices. This research has taken a path of theoretical endeavour to devise a conceptual framework that will effectively lead to a series of academic investigation into the socio-political characteristics of general programming channels. To this end, specific attention is paid to such theoretical and conceptual resources as the instrumentalization of media by the politics, the political sociology of media power, media-political parallelism, and the structural coupling between the political and the media systems. This paper suggests that general programming channels have emerged as a new interface that accommodates and actualizes the structural coupling between the two societal subsystems, and in the course of that, they undercut the vulnerable basis of media public sphere, effectively replacing it with entertaining media-political sphere constructed and managed by themselves. This sphere is where the media system's logic and the poltical system's logic are intertwined, simutaneously accelerating not only the mediatization of the politics but also the politicization of the media.