doxa.comunicación | nº 31, pp. 315-340 | 335
July-December of 2020
Ana Mancera Rueda and Paz Villar-Hernández
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
The action of la Junta Electoral Central (the Central Electoral Board) was prompted by an appeal lodged by the legal team of Carles Puigdemont, and thus, the former President of the Generalitat (Regional Catalonian Government) is presented as an actant in the next headline:
[Ex. 64]. Puigdemont takes Vox out11 of the Atresmedia debate thanks to the 2015 jurisprudence (El Diario, 16/04/2019)
Some media report other parties’ assessments of the electoral strategy adopted by Vox, as these headlines from ABC and El Confidencial confirm:
[Ex. 65]. The PP believes the electoral debates will leave Abascal out of the picture (ABC, 20/04/2019)
[Ex. 66]. General elections: Narbona warns that Vox’s agenda is already being “felt” in Andalusia (El Confidencial, 25/04/2019)
These headlines even echo warnings of the rise of this political force; thus, in [Ex. 66] the actant who formulates the statement is Cristina Narbona, president of the Socialist Part.
In addition, reference to Vox often appears together with remarks about the other two major parties on the right-wing political spectrum, which are referred to by the nominal syntagma of “the right-wing block”, or “the right of the trident”, by putting this party on the same level as the other two and standardising this radical right-wing party under the label of “the right”, and forming a kind of synecdoche that enhances its public image:
[Ex. 67]. Zapatero warns against voting for the right-wing bloc: “Vox is contagious” (OK Diario, 26/04/2019)
[Ex. 68]. Minister Dolores Delgado speaking against the PP, Ciudadanos and Vox: “Voting for the right of the trident is taking Spain into the shadows” (OK Diario, 13/04/2019)
4. Conclusions
In 1925, Dr Glenn Frank, Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin and Editor-in-Chief of The Century Magazine12, pointed out the influence of newspaper headlines on the shaping of public opinion with the following words: “When you stop to think how few people read beyond the headlines and how much of public opinion is made by headlines, you begin to realize the enormous influence exerted by the journalist who sits at a desk and writes the headlines”13. Two years later, Emig (1927) carried out a survey with a sample of 375 people, which allowed him to show that the majority of American newspaper readers based their opinions exclusively on reading the news headlines. Decades later, van Dijk (1983: 78) also warned of how the values and ideologies of journalists and newspapers are reflected in such texts often ‘in a subtle way’, influencing “the way readers will understand, memorize and use the information in the news to develop their knowledge and opinions about the “reality”.
11 The verb sacar (take out) could be included among the so-called verba omnibus, as it is a pro-forma that is not very limited semantically. Therefore, here we are faced with a characteristic lexical feature of the presence of the colloquial mode of use in newspaper headlines. For a more detailed study of this issue than we can provide here, see Mancera Rueda (2014).
12 A New York periodical that became very popular during the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th century.
13 Cited in Emig (1927)