This article introduces North Korean news media as meaningful research material, capable of elucidating issues of scholarly interest, such as the North Korean often debated but rarely understood ideology. To this end, a multiple step analysis, combining quantitative content analysis, CDA and narrative analysis, is performed on a sample of two constructed weeks of the 2015 Korean-language issues of Rodong Sinmun, the country's main daily.
With the core organizing idea of ideological framing in media messages and the understanding of news as a storytelling device, the analysis identifies prevalent patterns and frames, and uncovers text composition techniques employed to encode meanings into these structures. The results help to understand the world as viewed by North Korea and point to important policy changes in the current leadership.