Sensationalism is a broadcasting tendency that stimulates people’s natural instincts and appeals to their curiosity. The main goal of this tendency is to make the news more interesting, rather than to deliver correct information better. In particular, Korean press commonly use extreme language for such an effect. This is why Korean press is called Nambi press, which means that the press gets overly heated and easily cooled down by very minor things.

 

According to Munwha Broadcasting Corporation (MBC), there are two large types of exaggeration: using superlative words and adopting formulaic exaggeration. Korean press frequently asserts that it is the biggest, the highest, and the first news, even though they do not know what will happen in the future. Moreover, they rarely differentiate, but just repeat the same expressions all the time. As a result, people become desensitized.

 

At a glance, exaggeration in broadcasting language seems to be somewhat persuasive. By using extreme expressions, journalists give impressions that they are certain of what they are trying to convey. Also, it is hard to deny that it can approach the readers more easily than mild facts which are merely arranged in lists.

 

Despite such positive aspects of sensationalism, it has far more negative aspects. Such information offering resembles how street vendors attract their customers. What is important to them is how their commodities look, so that they can catch customers’ attention. This is completely different from frequenter marketers who sell their products based on trust.

 

Moreover, exaggeration such as street vendor marketing causes linguistic and social problems. As a linguistic problem, This indicates that there is no expression to use when extreme events happen in reality, as the press habitually uses extreme experessions for nomal news.

 

Such a linguistic problem later leads to social problems because the language people learn through broadcasting affects their ways of understanding the world. Overuse of extreme expressions makes our society black and white. For example, if it is not a simple problem, it becomes a complicated problem and something not perfect becomes equivalent to something poor. People do not perceive the world in different perspectives, but rather understand it in bipolar ways.

 

Therefore, the Korean press has to give up street vendor marketing, so that they can get out from this sensationalism route. Firstly, they need to recognize that readers’ interests come from the content itself, not from high-sounding expressions that cover it. Furthermore, they should try to broadcast essentially interesting news, instead of seemingly interesting ones. By doing this, they would become more trustworthy.