Migratory movements in the press of Spanish-speaking countries (2017)

Luis Guerra Salas,María Elena Gómez Sánchez

doi:10.1515/opli-2020-0019

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this article is to analyze journalistic texts on migratory movements appeared on the main newspapers of Spanish-speaking countries along 2017. The focus is put on the subjects that the newspapers highlight, the regions selected and the linguistics elections being made. The research has a multidisciplinary approach that uses the concept of representation, as being used in linguistics pragmatics and cultural anthropology. We use the database Factiva® as the starting point to collect the journalistic pieces that we use for our analysis. The search has been refined using linguistic, contextual, geographic and chronological criteria. Two sub-corpora have been built with the texts obtained through the search. One focuses strictly on Spanish press and the second one is related to the Hispanic area (seven newspapers have been chosen to build this corpus, and each one of them represents one of the seven ample dialectal areas of Spanish language). The qualitative analysis is based on the key words of each of these sub-corpora; such key words are stablished from a text-mining technique that offers the most relevant words and sentences of the first 100 texts obtained through every specific search.

Highlights

It becomes relevant to point out questions as the following: What migratory movements are interesting for the newspapers of the Hispanic world? Which elements are reflected by the press when informing about migration – security, employment, politics, elections, etc.? Do the media usually employ specific linguistic expressions when writing about migrations? How does the geographic location of media influence in the selection and treatment of the content related to migrations?
Information about migratory movements in other areas of the world (Asia, Africa) is irrelevant: mention to inmigrantes subsaharianos is due only to the pieces referring to vessels arriving from Africa to the Spanish shores
With regard to the question “Which elements are reflected by the press when informing about migration?”, it should be noted that the classification in sub-topics of the informative and opinion texts of the corpus shows that the migratory movements are considered, mainly, as a political issue

Summary

Introduction

3. To answer properly to these questions (and similar ones), journalistic texts published along 2017 in a sample of newspapers written in Spanish and representative of the dialectal areas of the Spanishspeaking world have been analyzed, both quantitatively and qualitatively. To answer properly to these questions (and similar ones), journalistic texts published along 2017 in a sample of newspapers written in Spanish and representative of the dialectal areas of the Spanishspeaking world have been analyzed, both quantitatively and qualitatively At this point, it should be said that this piece of research is the most recent one of a series of papers that, since 2014 and with a common methodology, have been collecting and studying pieces of news and opinions on migratory movements appeared on Hispanic press (Guerra 2016, Guerra and Gómez 2017)

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