316 | nº 31, pp. 315-340 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
Analysis of the discursive framing strategies used in Spanish press headlines regarding the electoral coverage...
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
1. Introduction
Since the 1980s, right-wing populism has experienced steady growth in votes in Europe (González Calleja, 2001; Bale, 2003; Mudde, 2007; Alonso and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2015), both in the European Parliament elections as well as the national elections of its member states (Redacción, 2019; TIMBRO, 2019).
This trend is not only European, but appears to be part of a global trend2.
Until 2019 Spain appeared to be an exception to this trend (González Enríquez, 2017), but it would cease to be so in the general elections of April 2019, when the far-right political party Vox won 24 seats in parliament, a result that was consolidated in the elections held a few months later in November of 2019, when it secured 52 seats, thus becoming Spain’s third largest political force.
Since the end of the dictatorship, the extreme right has had its own political platform in parties such as the Falange Española de las JONS, Falange Española (the original Falange), Falange Española Independiente, the Círculo Español de Amigos de Europa (CEDADE), the Frente Nacional, the Juntas Españolas and the coalition of Fuerza Nueva, which won a seat in the 1979 general elections. However, with the exception of those elections and a certain degree of electoral success of the party known as Plataforma per Catalunya (PxC) in municipal and regional elections at the beginning of the 21st
2 As demonstrated by the governments of Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Narendra Modi in India.
Abstract:
This research study is based on the analysis of a corpus of 413 news headlines of eight Spanish newspapers during the election coverage of Vox in the Spanish general elections held in April of 2019. By following the model developed by Gallardo Paúls (2014; 2021 in press), which examines pragmatic categories according to their textual, interactive and enunciative levels, we have identified discursive framing strategies that cognitively guide the headlines of all the newspapers in our corpus. Even though representative illocutivity, was the most frequently used in the texts compiled, a detailed analysis reveals that some of the media (e.g. ABC, La Vanguardia, El País and El Diario) used a conspicuous lexical strategy (by utilising, for example, metaphors, metonyms, nominalisations with ironic value, etc.), which was able to cause pre-activations contrary to this political party.
Keywords:
Framing; discursive strategies; political journalism; Spanish press: headlines.
Resumen:
La presente investigación se basa en el análisis de un corpus de 413 titulares que encabezaron los textos informativos de ocho diarios españoles, durante la cobertura electoral sobre Vox, en el transcur-so de los comicios generales celebrados en España en abril de 2019. Siguiendo el modelo desarrollado por Gallardo Paúls (2014; 2021 en prensa), que estudia las categorías pragmáticas de acuerdo con el nivel textual, el interactivo y el enunciativo, hemos podido iden-tificar determinadas estrategias de encuadre discursivo que contri-buyen a orientar cognitivamente los titulares de todos los periódicos que conforman nuestro corpus. Si bien la ilocutividad representa-tiva fue la mayoritaria en los textos recopilados, un análisis por-menorizado revela el empleo por parte de algunos de estos medios –como ABC y La Vanguardia o El País y El Diario– de una estrategia léxica marcada (a través del empleo de metáforas, metonimias, no-minalizaciones con valor irónico, etc.), capaz de suscitar preactiva-ciones contrarias a dicha formación política.
Palabras clave:
Encuadre; estrategias discursivas; periodismo político; prensa española; titular.
Received: 30/06/2020 - Accepted: 17/10/2020
Recibido: 30/06/2020 - Aceptado: 17/10/2020
