The Dominican digital press in news coverage. The case of the 2012 elections for overseas deputies.

Abstract

In this paper we analyse the news coverage offered by the Dominican digital press (listindiario.com and DiarioLibre.com), during the last two months of the official campaign process of the Dominican Republic's presidential elections and overseas deputies on 20 May 2012.  We set an informative treatment, specifically focusing on the information published in relation to the elections of the overseas deputies,  as these allowed Dominicans living abroad to be represented in Congress for the first time. In these elections, they exercised their right to vote from the following constituencies: No.1 in Canada and the United States; No.2 in the Caribbean, Latin America and Miami; and finally, No.3 in the Caribbean, Latin America and Miami; and finally, No.3 corresponding to Europe. From these constituencies they elected the president and vice-president of the Republic, as well as seven overseas deputies, which is the focus of this research. The study was carried out using the theory of Agenda Setting as a theoretical framework, using digital content analysis as a research technique and working from the quantitative method. Our aim was to find out to what extent the media disseminated information with the aforementioned characteristics, in order to discover to what extent they tried to encourage political participation abroad with their publications.