334 | 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

people to the campaign events organised by Vox was not reflected in the number of people who went to the bookshops to buy the biography of their leader.

The third element that Gallardo Paúls (2021, in press) identifies as a manifestation of the enunciative framework is actantiality. Despite the fact that when configuring our corpus we have selected only the headlines that contain at least one reference to Vox or its leader, we have found it significant that in most of them the people from this political party are not involved in the acts they refer to, as can be seen in [Image 7]:

Image 7. Distribution of actantiality in relation to Vox

Source: prepared by the authors

This is especially evident in the texts we have taken from El Mundo and El Diario, in which the responsibility for action lies with politicians and social agents outside of Vox, at 66%, 7% and 61.4% of the cases, respectively. This can be seen in the following examples:

[Ex. 62]. Sánchez allows Vox be seen as one of “the three right-wing parties” (El Mundo, 12/04/2019)

[Ex. 63]. The Andalusian Regional Government spoil the debate that Sánchez wanted with Vox (El Mundo, 17/04/2019)

In [Ex. 62], a report appeared with the strategy used by the PSOE leader in agreeing to take part in a debate in which the Vox candidate would also participate, which was eventually blocked by the Junta Electoral Central -Central Electoral Board-. The reasons for this was that participation by Abascal’s party in the debate was in breach of Spanish law, which requires all television broadcasters to respect the proportionality obtained in the previous elections, and the participation of Vox in the debate would have been injurious to other parties that had received greater national representation yet had not been invited to speak in the “five-way debate” organized by Atresmedia, as reflected in [Ex. 63].