| dc.description.abstract | A celebrity’s scandal can be an enthralling theme for the media to produce
news, either factual or fabricated. This research primarily focuses on
distorted content or media manipulation to report it. It explores the
correlation between misleading news and the motives behind twisted
reality. The method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative
method through the lens of the forensic linguistics approach, supported
by Villa’s interpretative pragmatics (2010). The collected data were from
selected sources of distorted media reporting, especially about a highly
considered Korean singer’s crime, known Seungri of Bigbang. His charge
was not direct link with sexual abuse and systematic drugs, which is in
fact unrevealed wealthy people committing them. Even nonconsensual
disclosure of sexually-explicit videos was committed by other celebrities.
Yet, the media fraudulently blended and misrepresented Seungri as the key
figure of the scandal in a club named ‘Burning Sun’. Society was misled to
hate and blame him. This research shows that passive constructions, lexical
references, and subject matters of the texts become linguistic evidence of
fact distortion. Manipulating celebrity’s scandal is driven by political goals,
such as creating mistrust and bewildering larger audiences, especially in
South Korea about proving the justice system as the actual culprits are
withdrawn. This research is noteworthy since there are interwoven claims
of the power of media to wriggle out of legal punishments after spreading
distorted facts. Hence, it implies that pragmatics is applicable and
efficacious to prove the case. It leads to defamation by media, correlated
with forensic linguistics. To reveal the distorted facts by deceitful media,
this study expectantly contributes in enhancing social awareness of the
truth behind blatant public outrage and its social consequences | en_US |
