El presente artículo explora cómo el factor cultural se ha erigido como un componente estratégico de la proyección internacional para las ciudades. Se realizaron entrevistas en profundidad a los representantes de los museos estudiados, así como a representantes gubernamentales de cultura de Bogotá y Bilbao. Se llevóa cabo análisis de contenido en medios de comunicación representativos y en las páginas webs de los museos. Se evidencia que Bogotá aún carece de una estrategia de comunicación sostenida y articulada, que permita mejorar el posicionamiento internacional, mientras Bilbao muestra haber escalado exitosamente en su reconocimiento y proyección de Marca Ciudad.

The media and terrorism is an area that has attracted researchers’ attention in looking at the strategic dimensions of framing. This paper combines both Entman’s framing theory (and his ‘cascading activation’ model for analysis of framing contests) with a dramatistic approach to rhetoric (the Burkean concepts of the pentad and ratios) to see whether connections can be made that help provide a better understanding of the phenomenon of interactions between politicians’ words and media reactions to those words. Speeches given by the Spanish Prime Minister and the official opposition in reaction to a terrorist attack in Madrid are analysed. Our empirical analysis shows a highly fragmented capacity for cultural resonance, and a ‘two sided context’ with two very different interpretations of the situation. Our findings demonstrate that an appreciation of the dramatistic approach to rhetoric enhances our comprehension of people’s motives for adopting or rejecting the different frames used by leaders (politicians and the media) as they seek to frame issues for a range of purposes. They also suggest that combining approaches from the humanities and the social sciences by emphasizing motives as a key variable for the dynamics of framing contests might open up interesting avenues for research on framing as also on the relations between symbols and actions.