News coverage of International Women`s Day in the Spanish press in a crisis context

Abstract

For more than a century the International Women´s Day is commemorated the 8th of March in the whole world; institutions and civilians take advantage of the public opinion’s attention, to show their demands in order to achieve real equal rights. In 2012’s edition two extraordinary circumstances come together in Spain: the entry of the abortion issue into the political agenda, as a result of the proposal of changes in the law introduced by the new government and a critical economic situation with in depth reforms. The main hypothesis aims to analyze how these 2 facts affect the information coverage of the event; we have used the content analysis to find out what the Spanish newspapers talk about when they talk about women, what kind of sources they use and what opinions they maintain and what their representation of women is in this crisis context.