Argumentation and political action: The Journalistic discourse in the catalan conflict

Abstract

The article deals with the role of the media in the Catalan problem and its participation as agents involved in the conflict. To this end, it studies 25 editorials of each one of the six most relevant newspapers of national circulation: El Mundo, El País, ABC, La Razón, El Periódico and La Vanguardia. The quantitative and qualitative analysis focuses on the mechanisms of the argumentative discourse: the approach to the most relevant topics; lexical cohesion; the modalization; the presence of the logical modalities and the mechanisms of connectivity. From the data obtained, it is determined whether in the verbal component predominates the reflection of the emotional, as a category associated with the belligerent discourse, or the rational, as an exponent of a reflective attitude. In this sense, we observe the incidence of three factors in the institutional attitude of each newspaper: the ideological factor, the territorial one and the communicative style.