Critical Viewing of Television Debate Programs and its Implications on Media Education

The present study explored ways of critical viewing of the television debate program on current public affairs by examining the three broadcast debate programs-Late Night Debate(Sim-ya-to-ron), 100 Minute Debate(100-boon-to-ron), and Offense/Defense Debate(To-ron-gong-bang) - aired respectively by KBS, MBC, and SBS. The critical viewing of the television rebate program; was exclusively~in respect of media education which was understood in the present study as the practice to enhance the audience's ability to decode, evaluate, and analyze the media contents and their production processes, as well as to cultivate media users with civic and democratic skills. Three specific research questions were asked: firstly, what were the basic program formation or structure of each broadcast debate program? Secondly, what were the characteristics in topics or subjects of each debate program? Thirdly, how did the debate panels consist of in the three debate programs? To answer these questions, a totaI of 61 program units from Late Night Debate, 100 Minute Debate, and Offense/Defense Debate aired from June to October :ro1 were secured from the web sites of KBS, MBC, and SBS. The basic program structures of each debate program were found analogous to each other with minor variations. Each program was started with facilitators' opening comments introducing the specific debate topics and appealing to the audience's interests. Then, with or without showing a brief edited material, most proportion of the whole program time of 80-120 minutes was allocated for debates and argumentations across each panel comprising 4 to 7 people for whom facilitators presented main controversial issues. In the midst of the debate, facilitators asked several spectators in their studios and introduced a coup e of viewers who wanted to show their opinions on the phone. Topics covered in the debate programs were diverse current public affairs and issues from the social impact of the film Friend (Chin-goo) to the North-South issue. Specifically, the topics were identified into six categories such as issues of domestic politics, international politics, economics, society, culture, and education. Table 1 showed dominant proportion of social, economic, and political (domestic and international) issues. Presumably, debate program viewers could become knowledgeable on the issues which the debate programs dealt with and conceive those issues as salient national agendas. For the analysis of the composition of debate panels, five categories of groups were produced according to panels' social and occupational characteristics: groups from the administration, political parties, social organizations (interest groups, civil organizations, etc.), professors, and experts. The finding showed that approximately 60% of the whole panels of the three debate programs were professors and experts (see Table 2), implicating that the three debate programs comoosed panel members with similar occupational backgrounds and professors and experts were easy to persuade to participate in panels. The findings beared several implications in terms of critical viewing, one of media education objectives, of broadcast debate programs. First, related to program structures, the finding that the time allocation and participation format for spectators and viewers were very much limited compared to those for panel members made it doubtful whether each debate program, as the broadcasting companies emphasized, functioned as a public sphere or a sphere for debate or communication in order to have their viewers vigorously participate in broadcast debates. Accordingly, judging from the analysis of panel composition, spectators and viewers were not regarded as a important constituent of the panel who were much engaged in topics. To have some of the general public be involved as panel members in debates potentially indicates to make viewers of debate programs more conscious of and get engaged in their public life and public issues as empowered citizens or democratic viewers