2. Corpus and methodology

The aim of our research is to determine how the Spanish generalist press at the national level framed the information it published about Vox during the campaign of the general elections of 28 April 2019, an election in which this party obtained representation in the Spanish Parliament for the first time ever.

The methodology we have used is a pragmatically-based discourse analysis. The analysis model used is the one developed by Gallardo Paúls (2014; 2021 in press), which links the three linguistic levels described by Morris (1985) with the assumptions of cognitive linguistics (Fillmore, 1976; Langacker, 1987; Lakoff, 1990). To the modalities of discursive framing presented by Gallardo Paúls (2014; 2021 in press), or in other words, to the enunciative, textual and interactive, we incorporate the analysis of some formal aspects of journalistic works, which represent what we call “formal or external” framing (Villar Hernández, 2015) [Table 2].

The media under study were selected based on ComScore audience data from March of 2019. According to these data, El País, La Vanguardia, El Mundo and ABC were the leading media in digital format, in that same order, followed by 20 Minutos, El Confidencial, El Español, El Diario and OK Diario. All of these media were selected for our research, with the exception of 20 Minutos. The sample was made up of eight newspapers, including four that are long-standing (ABC, La Vanguardia, El País and El Mundo), as well as four that are digital (El Confidencial, El Español, El Diario and OK Diario). The news articles were downloaded in November of 2019 from the digital editions of the media indexed in the Factiva database (Dow Jones). The terms Vox and Abascal, linked by the Boolean search operator “and”, were used as search criteria during the campaign period from 12 to 26 April of 2019. As Factiva does not compile the news published in OK Diario, the search for these was carried out in Google using the same criteria and limiting the search to this newspaper’s website. After a review and screening process, the corpus consisted of 413 pieces of information, according to the following frequencies and percentages [Table 1]:

Table 1. Presence of the terms Vox and Abascal in the press during the 28 April election campaign.

Source: prepared by the authors