Shaping Public Opinion for Confrontation: Catalan Independence Claims as Represented in Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, and Basque Editorials

Abstract

Editorials represent a newspaper's principal means of ideological positioning and serve to identify the attitude of each newspaper and its readership to some of the main actors in any given conflict, especially those that are political in nature. Catalonia's independence movement has experienced a surge in recent years. The turning point came in July 2010, after Spain's constitutional court ruled against some aspects of Catalonia's Statute of Autonomy (the legislation regulating the relationship between the Catalan autonomous community and the Spanish state). The ruling annulled some of the articles of the statute. The demonstration in support of Catalan independence that took place on September 11, 2012, was considered the most important among several mass rallies held for this purpose over successive years on Catalonia's National Day. This article presents the results of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of editorial articles published around these two key dates, with the goal of studying each newspaper's treatment of political actors and their degree of identification with these actors. Their use of arguments aimed at persuading readers and legitimizing a given position during the specified time periods in 2010 and 2012 will also be studied. The study focuses on the editorial articles published by several newspapers in four distinct regional contexts: Catalonia, Valencia, the Basque Country, as well as the

Framing Catalonia: Evidence from Québec media

“…It is a highly partisan media system (Chaqués Bonafont and Baumgartner 2013), with newspapers adopting explicitly partisan editorial preferences (Baumgartner and Chaqués Bonafont 2015). In recent years, they have given greater importance to the Catalan conflict than to any other Spanish political issue in a rather personalized way between the main leaders of the two camps (Xicoy et al 2017(Xicoy et al : 1053). This has given rise to many studies.…”

The Editorial Opinion of the Mainstream Media During the Catalan Elections of 2017: A Madrid–Barcelona Comparative Study

“…With a view to examining how the media's stance had evolved since the beginning of the pro-independence movement, in the aforementioned article (Xicoy et al, 2017), we analyzed editorials from mainstream Spanish and Catalan newspapers on the protests against the 2010 Statute of Autonomy court ruling and the 2012 independence demonstrations. We now believe it is worth diving deeper into this to analyze the articles that were ran during the 2017 Catalan electoral campaign from a wider range of media.…”

“…This shift began in 2010 when the Spanish People’s Party (PP) filed an appeal against the Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia, which the Catalans had voted for in a referendum in 2006 (discussed in more detail in another article published in this journal; Xicoy et al, 2017). The appeal was upheld and Spain’s constitutional court subsequently amended the Statute.…”

Analysis of the social and media debate during the Catalan Independence Referendum

“…Rocío Zamora-Medina and Leonarda García-Jiménez DOI: 10.25200/BJR.v18n1.2022.1421 Xicoy et al, 2017). The media and the social networks, notably Twitter (Moragas-Fernández et al, 2019;Hernández-Santaolalla & Sola-Morales, 2019;Arce et al, 2020;Carrasco et al, 2018), intensified the debate with such radically opposing arguments that the referendum attempt has been defined as "a totally polarized media war" (López-Olano & Fenoll, 2019, p. 2).…”

“…The large number of samples which we have read in order to carry out our research (901 press articles and 3.822 Twitter posts) makes this a methodical and rigorous study of how the traditional media (in this case printed) and the social networks (specifically Twitter) interpreted the events that occurred between October 1st and October 8th, 2017. This research does not focus exclusively on either the press (Vellón, 2020;Pont-Sorribes et al, 2019;Dubois & Villeneuve-Siconnelly, 2019;Perales-García & Pont-Sorribes, 2017;Cartes-Barroso, 2018;Dorado & Sixto-García, 2021;Xicoy et al, 2017;Irala-Hortal, 2020) or on social networks (Anderson, 2019;San Cornelio & Gómez Cruz, 2019;Carrasco et al, 2018;Hernández-Santaolalla & Sola-Morales, 2019;Gil Ramírez, 2019) as other previous studies have done, but instead includes both, in their textual and visual dimensions, which allowed us to establish diverse comparatives of the regional/national/international axes and/or the press and Twitter, which enriches the exploration of the discursive and communicative complexity which characterized the events of October 1st. As can be seen, this comparative approximation has been less frequently employed in the field of communication research in Spain (Pérez Curiel, 2020).…”