Articulo_5_EN_Doxa_31_European_migrants

This study is significant owing to the innovative perspective from which it seeks to determine the relevance of foreign media for Germans in the process of integration and the construction of Europe. It focuses on the analysis of the media consumption of the German population living on the Costa del Sol, which is not only the second largest European popu-lation group in the region, but also the second largest in terms of the number of media in their own language, according to the census carried out in this project.

This research aims to provide a better understanding of the overall process of achieving the goal of a united, pluralistic Europe, at a stage in the European project that is particularly critical because of Brexit and the wave of Euroscepticism in many European parties, which are fuelling fears among the peoples of Europe as regards the integration process. It is therefore more necessary than ever to analyse, on the one hand, how Europeans see this whole process and the role played or to be played by Spanish media published in German and the German media distributed in Spain. On the other, it is also essential to examine the way the German-language media distributed on the Costa del Sol promote or determine understanding, cohesion and integration, and, ultimately, help to achieve the goal of the European project.

This research, together with the other studies conducted in the project of which it is a part, will also help to obtain a snap-shot of the European migrant populations as active audiences, or at least of a significant part of them.

2. Literature review

The first studies on the foreign media and information published in other languages on the Costa del Sol and in Spain were conducted when mass migration and tourism was beginning in the 1970s (García Galindo 1998). As García Galindo and López Romero (2013) and López Romero and Serrano Porras (2016) have noted, however, information in other lan-guages has been published in the Costa del Sol press since the early 20th century. Yet, the long presence of information in other languages and the existence of foreign media on the Costa del Sol, the Canary Islands, the Valencian coast and other areas of Spain has not given rise to extensive research into this phenomenon. In general, academic research on foreign media is not very abundant and, in the little that has been conducted, the group that has received the most attention is the British, probably because they represent the main population of foreigners settled on the Costa del Sol (Karen O’Reilly 2009; Betty 1997; Betty & Duran 2008; Rodríguez, Fernández-Mayoralas, & Rojo 2004; Villaverde & Hierro 2013). Other authors have approached foreigners from a more general point of view (García Galindo & López Romero 2018; Oliveau et al. 2019). Our study now aims to look more closely at the situation of German citizens, the second largest European population living on the Costa del Sol.

Previous research on German residents in Spain is scarce and none of the studies that have been conducted have ad-dressed the phenomenon on the Costa del Sol. Dorn Padilla (2012) examined the case of German tourists in the Canary Islands, but not German residents, as is our case. Her study is, nevertheless, of great interest because it analyses the press coverage of this community in the Canary Islands and shows that it is also the second largest European community pres-ent in the islands. Furthermore, she highlights the impact of German tourism on the development of journalistic activities