La diplomacia pública estadounidense de la "guerra contra el terror": análisis y evaluación de su influencia en la prensa española

Abstract

Public diplomacy is an international political communication activity that experienced renewed importance in the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The War on Terror promoted by the Bush Administration was accompanied by the implementation of public diplomacy strategies designed to reinforce the fight against terrorism and to diminish the levels of anti-Americanism, especially in the Muslim world, through the exercise of soft power. The object of this thesis is, in the first place, to study public diplomacy as an international political communication activity. In the second place, to carry out empirical research that, resorting to framing theory as a methodological tool, analyzes and evaluates the influence of Bush¿s declarations and speeches, as a part of American mediatic diplomacy, in the Spanish press, in two case studies on the War on Terror (the first case study spans the period from 9/11 to November 2001, and the second, the months prior to the Iraq War). To do so, the content of this thesis is set out in six chapters. The first chapter presents a theoretical framework of public diplomacy, the second chapter explains the methodology that is used in the empirical study and the third chapter offers a context for the case studies where that methodology is applied. Chapters four, five and six constitute the empirical part of the work: in the first two the results of the analysis of mediatic diplomacy in two specific periods of the War on Terror are exposed, and, in the last, an evaluation of its influence based on the results of the analysis and on the consideration of other relevant factors is performed.