News story and construction of a controversy on education

Abstract

Through the study of a controversy about education in two Spanish newspapers, we analyze the process by which the news story of a polemic issue contributes to the construction of a controversy, at the same time that this controversy determines the construction of the news story. The results show that the news story presents peculiarities that distinguish it from the narrative of fiction, showing in particular the dependence of the events of the daily life that determine the processes of narrative construction. In this sense, the beginning and end of the story, the narrated facts, the reaction either of the subjects of the discourse and the readers, as well as the coherence of the facts, are among other factors beyond the media control. Nevertheless, the media maintains the control of other aspects as fundamental as framing, perspective and point of view of the story, the choice of the voices and the use of different strategies to give coherence to the story or to resolve its contradictions. What we have finally found are in fact two different stories: one narrated in a seemingly objective way, definable from the discourse, and another "not found” in the story in which the media appears as the agent of the controversy.