REV - Communication & Society - Volumen 32, N. 4 (2019)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10171/57813

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    Communication, Activism and the News Media: An Agenda for Future Research
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Carragee, K.M. (Kevin-M.)
    This study examines two central questions focusing on the news media and political change: How do we best understand the relationship between the news media and political change? How do we best understand the interaction between the news media and social movements? The analysis initially relates these two questions to three broad issues, exploring the importance of digital activism, stressing the need to examine issues related to power in order to fully grapple with these questions, and highlighting the ahistorical nature of research on digital activism and on disinformation campaigns. Following this discussion, the study defines a detailed agenda for future framing research, pointing to significant shortcomings in this perspective. These limitations include conceptual difficulties in the definition of frames, and the failure of many studies to analyze frame sponsorship and the centrality of resources in the ability to sponsor frames. Subsequently, this discussion focuses on the lack of attention to framing processes in most of the research literature, and the failure to consider emotions as an influence on framing. This study concludes by examining how engaged or activist research can address shortcomings in framing research. By revitalizing framing research, we can better understand the complex relationship between the news media and political change and between the news media and social movements.
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    Brand activism
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Manfredi-Sánchez, J.L. (Juan Luis)
    In this work, brand activism is defined as a strategy that seeks to influence citizen-consumers by means of campaigns created and sustained by political values. It involves a transformation in corporate communication management and social responsibility practices, which borrows from those of social movements to contribute to the social production of identity of citizen-consumers. This corporate political shift involves the use of messages, slogans and content based on final (of common interest) or instrumental (linked to the industry in which they are applied) political values. Political behaviour does not operate in a vacuum but is the response to a change in values of the young generations employing digital technologies and demanding a different behaviour from global firms. However, these political advertising practices have been heavily criticised in the field of political economy, insofar as it is contended that they are impostures lacking authenticity. Thus, 45 campaigns were analysed to determine the characteristics of brand activism in this new socio-political context. From the results it follows that this activist practice, of Anglo-Saxon origin, is a relevant trend in political communication because it aligns individual identity, the management of public assets and corporate action in the political sphere.
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    Social Movements in Politics and the Media: The case of the Pro-underground railway Platform of Murcia in the 2019 local elections
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) López-Rico, C.M. (Carmen María); González-Esteban, J.L. (José Luis)
    15M was the first reaction by some of the most important social movements in recent years in Spain. It was the impetus behind the emergence of the ‘tides’ or movements dedicated to education and health issues. However, after a few years of social inaction, citizen movements seem to have revived thanks to the feminist demonstrations of 8th March 2018 and the pensioners’ protests because of their loss of purchasing power. In these times, when parliamentary majorities are in decline, it seems that citizen platforms are emerging as an alternative means of making their demands known to institutions. In the case presented in this study, the citizens of Murcia created a platform to demand that the Government comply with the plan for building the AVE railway tracks underground, as they had promised. Since then, the Citizen Pro-Underground Railway Platform has held several demonstrations and thanks to social networks it has developed a successful mass communication strategy. This study has been carried out in two phases and presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Platform’s communication strategy. In addition, it aims to determine its level of participation in the political and media Twitter conversation ahead of the 2019 local and regional elections in Murcia.
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    Social mobilization and media framing in the journalistic coverage of oil survey permits in the Mediterranean
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Chavez, M. (Manuel); Mercado-Sáez, M. T. (María Teresa); Sahuquillo-Verdet, F. (Fernando)
    The granting of hydrocarbon exploration permits in the Gulf of Valencia in 2010 brought thousands of citizens of the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands to the streets until 2015 when the beneficiary company renounced to carry out the project. As in other cases of citizen protests, different concerns and positions were expressed in the media. Knowing the media frameworks around these projects is the main objective of this research. Specifically, the research looks to identify the presentation of positions for or against the risks and potential benefits, and to determine the presence of social mobilization as an information source in the coverage of the three reference newspapers in the affected area: Levante-EMV (Valencia), Mediterráneo (Castellón) and Diario de Ibiza. From the theoretical perspective of framing, the frames used in reporting are revealed in terms of the definition of the problem. The results of the analysis of 1,258 texts have made it possible to identify frames of benefit and risk, much more frequent on the latter, focusing on the economic risk for tourism and fishing, and above all, on environmental risk. The frame of benefit referred to the economic advantages that would reduce the dependence on energy, occupies a discreet place since, in this case, the main actors in the conflict -politicians and civil society- coincided in their arguments, both becoming protagonists of media discourse in their role as sources.
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    Framing Forest Fires and Environmental Activism: a Storytelling Contest about Human Intervention in Nature
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Montagut, M. (Marta); Castelló, E. (Enric)
    This article focuses on the processes of sense-making of forest fires in a Mediterranean context. The authors use a textual approach to compare media framing with activist organizational storytelling. The authors conducted a frame analysis in two major daily newspapers in Catalonia (La Vanguardia and El Periódico de Catalunya) during three summers and compared the results with the stories from four leading activist and volunteering organizations that came out of in-depth interviews with their members, one focus group and published materials. The results identified up to five major mainstream media frames, among which were stories focusing on agricultural risk, climate change and weather conditions; imprudent and negligent attitudes; inappropriate fuel management and woodland conditions; and arson. The natural self-regulatory frame was present as part of the discourse of resilience but almost residual. Some journalism focused on the spectacular nature of the events and their dramatic impact, which led to some degree of mediatization of wildfires. The organizations problematized these frames and discussed about the appropriateness of human intervention to prevent forest fires. The results also revealed that activists observed the issue from a broader complexity, replicating frames on “structural responsibility” instead of “individual responsibility” allocation. The authors point out that if wildfires are to be better understood and dealt with more in-depth knowledge is required of different stakeholders’ approaches to preventing forest fires.
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    The green battle in the media: A framing analysis of environmental press coverage
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Domínguez, M. (Martí); Mateu, A. (Anna)
    The analysis of environmental media coverage using framing theory allows us to study and compare its evolution over time and establish a typology to discuss how the media echoes environmental issues and controversies. In this article, we propose a framing typology for environmental discourses, based on previous typologies and expanded with the different interpretive frames we have identified in environment-related opinion texts published in two historical periods: the 1980s and the year 2018. This frame typology can be used in the analysis of reporting about environmental movements and conflicts, and to other practical cases of environmental hot topics like climate change. The analysis of the environmental discourse in the press can be very useful to establish the evolution of this type of discourse in our society and the predominant concept of nature at a particular time.
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    Framing EU trade policy online: the case of @NoAlTTIP on Twitter
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Oleart, A. (Álvaro); Bouza, L. (Luis); Tuñón, J. (Jorge)
    Since the argumentative turn in EU studies, research has shown that civil society activists can challenge frames promoted by EU institutions and incumbent groups, and influence public opinion in the EU. However, most studies of civil society mobilisation on EU issues have focused on the vertical framing of issues from Brussels to national capitals, rarely analysing mobilisation beyond Brussels. This article builds upon ongoing research on Spanish civil society activism on the TTIP (Bouza & Oleart, 2018) and framing EU issues on Twitter (Bouza & Tuñón, 2018), contributing to the study of the role of national activists in the horizontal translation of EU-wide mobilisation to national publics. We argue that national actors play an influential role in the discursive struggle to define ‘Europe’ and the EU in the (national) public spheres (Díez Medrano, 2003). Building on our previous analysis of national activism on TTIP in Spain, we analyse whether activists have engaged in a process of frame bridging (Snow et al., 1986), in order to expand the mobilisation against TTIP towards new issues and constituencies relating to the broader trade strategy of the EU. The present research addresses the role of the Spanish anti- TTIP social movement in the emergence, circulation and bridging of critical frames on the TTIP negotiations in the Spanish Twitter sphere. The article combines quantitative and qualitative methods –network analysis and framing analysis– in order to analyse the role of the @NoAlTTIP network in the building and diffusion of frames challenging the EU institutions discourse on trade in the Spanish context.
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    Motives and social actor positioning: the representation of the Chilean student movement in the national press
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Pérez-Arredondo, C. (Carolina)
    The student movement has always been at the centre of political change in Chile, which has resulted in tensions with the heavily monopolized media. These tensions have forced the student movement to resort to more alternative media outlets to both disseminate their information and to challenge the criminalization of their movement. In this context, this article sets to explore the attributions of motive in the representation of the Chilean student movement during a three-year period (2011-2013) in the mainstream and alternative press. Throughout this article, motive is understood as the implicit and/or explicit manifestation of an individual and/or collective’s drive or wish to do (or not do) something in a particular context. The corpus comprises over 3,000 news articles, which were analysed in the light of Harré’s (2010, 2015) Social Actor Positioning and van Leeuwen’s (2000, 2008) legitimation and purpose frameworks. Results show the use of specific ideological narratives that legitimize these actors’ motives in the media representation of this conflict. Similarly, the attribution of motives depends on the actors’ role in society and the kind of press analysed. Finally, there are irreconcilable ideological differences in the government’s understanding of the students’ right and duties and vice versa, which are heavily grounded in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
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    Brazilians in Spain: communication and transnational activism in a context of economic-political crisis
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Cogo, D. (Denise)
    The purpose of this article is to analyze the communication and transnational activism of Brazilian immigrants in Barcelona, Spain, which can be linked to the current context of economic and political crisis in Brazil, focusing on the collective actions of these immigrants against the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff. Based on the theoretical interface between communication, migration, transnationalism and activism, the article uses a qualitative approach that includes semi-structured interviews with seven Brazilian activists in Barcelona and the collection of communication materials produced and shared by activists in digital spaces. The results highlight the complementarity of street spaces and digital social networks in the exercise of an activism in which immigrants reestablish links, participate and intervene in the politics of the country of origin, articulate with the Brazilian diaspora in the world and give visibility to the context of economic-political crisis in Brazil in social and media spaces in Spain and other European countries. We highlight the relevance of gender relations, recognizing that most of the activists are women immigrants, and the preponderance of mobilizations guided by a feminist agenda that demarcates actions related to the impeachment in Brazil.
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    Feminist hashtag activism in Spain: measuring the degree of politicisation of online discourse on #YoSíTeCreo, #HermanaYoSíTeCreo, #Cuéntalo y #NoEstásSola
    (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Navarra, 2019) Orbegozo-Terradillos, J. (Julen); Larrondo-Ureta, A. (Ainara); Morales-i-Gras, J. (Jordi)
    The use of Twitter as a tool for mobilisation has made digital social and political activism a growing area of interest in communication research. Scholars have underscored the effectiveness of Twitter in galvanising the opinion of broad sectors of the public and expressing the indignation of average citizens on issues of social concern (Bruns et al., 2015; Martínez, 2017). The rise of feminist social media activism has prompted a number of studies on the feminist movement’s use of hashtags to foster online conversations on specific issues (Jinsook, 2017; Turley & Fisher, 2018; etc.). This article examines the correlation between the degree of ideological commitment amongst social media users and the nature of their Twitter conversations on a given issue. The analysis focuses on Twitter conversations generated by feminists, influencers, journalists and politicians in reaction to the controversial sentencing of the Wolf Pack (La Manada) –a gang of men involved in a sexual assault perpetrated during the San Fermín festival in Pamplona. Big data techniques were used to explore the nature of messages containing four highly charged hashtags central to feminist discourse on this issue: #YoSiTeCreo (Yes, I believe you), #HermanaYoSíTeCreo (Yes, sister, I believe you), #Cuéntalo (Talk about it) and #NoEstásSola (You are not alone). Our findings indicate that the levels of ideological commitment of Twitter users participating in what was essentially a feminist conversation varied to an extent that impeded serious interaction amongst them, either online or offline. From the perspective of communication strategy, feminist hashtag activism would appear to be an intermediate step in a longer process of creating a higher consciousness regarding gender equality issues in Spain.