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Erasmus Mundus Masters
Journalism, Media and Globalisation
(joint degree)
Framing indignation: from protest to political party
by
Veronica Sarno
Student ID: 11300507
Master’s Thesis
Graduate School of Communication
Master’s programme Communication Science
Supervisor: Prof. Joost van Spanje
Date of completion: 1st June 2017
2 Abstract
Many social movement studies have found that news media act as agents of the status quo and tend to marginalize demonstrators. Do these findings still apply in the current changed society and media environment? Are they also valid when these movements enter the electoral arena? This study answered these questions through a single-country study of a social movement, 15M, and its ‘product’, the political party Podemos. By means of news content analysis, I examined whether episodic frames prevailed over the thematic frames in the news coverage of the two most-read Spanish newspapers. Apart from minor differences, the results showed that episodic frames were far more present in the news coverage of both political actors, with no significant differences across newspapers. This is an exploratory study which seeks to give new insights in social movements and political parties studies but also to discuss the implication of this kind of media coverage for society.
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Framing Indignation From Protest to Political Party
On May 15th 2011 many squares in Spain were occupied by the indignados, the outraged,
who protested against the austerity measures that had led to high unemployment rates and welfare cuts. They blamed the corrupted political system and the banks for the economic crisis. The plazas were occupied for several months and more than six million Spaniards participated in the protests1. The movement eventually lost ground, but it was a breakthrough in Spanish society. Three years later, a party established a few months before, Podemos, gained five seats in the European Parliament, basing its campaign on the instances of the indignados.
The 15M movement (the other name of the indignados) was an ‘ideologically and politically plural movement’, which called for a reform of the state to include more citizens’ participation (Castells, 2012), and tried “to give voice to those whose demands remained unanswered” (Hutter, Kriesi & Lorenzini, n.d., p. 2). Podemos was the next, necessary step “to bring these demands to the institutional arena” (Hutter, Kriesi & Lorenzini, n.d., p. 3). The party was able to connect to the mood of the people by putting on the agenda those themes that concerned the citizens but were ignored by the major parties, such as corruption and inequality (Torreblanca, 2015).
These themes should be also addressed by media, as their role is to give space to any kind of political actors, both from the centre and the periphery of society, in order to provide citizens with all relevant information and, consequentially, encourage their mobilization and participation (Strömbäck, 2005). If these political actors are negatively portrayed by the media and/or their messages are neglected, the chances to reach their goals can diminish as a consequence of an uninformed/misinformed citizenship (Shoemaker, 1984). For the aim of this study, I looked at whether 15M and Podemos were given such media stage to express their demands.
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The ambition was also to fill a gap in the literature on media research. Specifically, many studies have reconstructed the path from 15M to Podemos, and their similarities and differences (see, among others, Calvo & Alvarez, 2015; Marzolf & Ganuza, 2016; Lobera, 2015), but no research has been done on their media coverage.
On a more general level, there is a wide literature on social movements that has
demonstrated how social movements are downplayed by media, which “reflect the interests of the existing power structure” (Brasted, 2005, p. 7), while media research on new political parties is mainly dealing with right-wing populist parties (e.g. Bos, van der Brug & de Vreese, 2010). Hence, what is missing is a study that analyses whether media engage in the same marginalizing type of coverage when dealing with a political party born out of a social movement.
There are not many examples where such a connection between a social movement and a political party can be found. Yet, the case of 15M and Podemos provides a clear link, as members of the party themselves recognized the influence the indignados had on them (Lobera, 2015). I hence conducted a news content analysis of the main Spanish newspapers, at the time when 15M and Podemos were on the rise. To compare their media coverage, I developed a series of frames to answer the following research question:
RQ: How do news frames change when social movements become political parties? FRAMES AS SALIANCE
The study of news framing has always been present in the communication field and has generated different definitions. According to Gitlin (1980), a frame is a “principle of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, happens, and what matters” (p. 6-7). News frames are the product of journalistic routines and organizational
constraints (Gitlin, 1980; Iyengar, 1991; Pan & Kosicki, 1993) and of the shared beliefs about society (Pan, 1993), or of the dominant ideologies (Gitlin, 1980).
Entman’s definition, though, is more comprehensive: “to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote
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a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and/or treatment
recommendation for the item described” (1993, p. 52). Frames are used by journalists, consciously or not, to highlight only some aspects of an issue or event, in order to provide a specific
interpretation. Frames in turn affect the salience of the topic, that is, they “introduce or raise the salience or apparent importance of certain ideas, activating schemas that encourage target audiences to think, feel, and decide in a particular way” (Entman, 2007, p. 164).
Frames play an important role in political news (Entman, 1993; Iyengar, 1991). They may help distribute political power among certain groups, issues or individuals and they also reflect these groups’ struggle to dominate the interpretation of an issue (Entman, 1993; 2007). According to the power bias hypothesis, the most powerful actors have more access to news media, and, as a consequence, their frames, their interpretation of an event or issue, are widely covered by the media (Hänggli, 2012).
Thus media tend to favour the side “regarded as most powerful, popular, and unified” (Entman, 2007, p. 167).
This frame-building process has important repercussions, both at the individual and societal level (frame-setting). Media mediate between political actors and citizens. In this chain of
communication, the frame building takes place between political actors and journalists (Hänggli, 2012). Then, through the media, frames arrive at the public. Minor changes in the media frames may substantially affect citizens’ frames and interpretations of an issue or event and elicit either individual or society/government attribution of responsibility for its causes and solutions (Chong & Druckman, 2007; Iyengar, 1991).
One example of how frames affect people’s perception of a problem is the use of episodic or thematic frames.
Episodic frames “depict public issues in terms of concrete instances”, individual cases or events (Iyengar, 1991, p. 14). As a result, they deemphasize the importance of the social issue at the national level and “allow public officials to ignore problems” which they could solve (Iyengar,
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1991, p. 143). Thematic frames, instead, provide deeper analysis of a problem, of its context and structural causes. They will hence spark public opinion discussion and call for a societal and governmental action to deal with the issue.
Although “culture is the stock of commonly invoked frames” (Entman, 1993, p. 53), frames do not always influence the receiver the way the communicator expects: the reader may well employ other frames, thus reaching conclusions other to those suggested by the journalist.
As for the specific elements that constitute a frame, the majority of studies provide their own operational definition, according to the topic that is being researched. Tankard (2001) and Entman (1993) mention that frames can be found in the use of specific keywords, catchphrases, stereotyped images, source of information, which “provide thematically reinforcing clusters of facts or
judgments” (Entman, 1993, p. 52). Frames can also stem from journalistic routines, e.g. focus on conflict, human interest stories, morality etc. (Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000). These are generic frames, but issue-specific frames, which deal with defined topics and events, can be found in the news as well.
The tension between episodic and thematic framing is well documented in the news coverage of social movements. Many studies have dealt with the so called ‘protest paradigm’, a type of news coverage which focuses on concrete demonstrations (the what, episodic), but not on the reasons behind them (the why, thematic) (Chan & Lee, 1984). The main characteristics of the ‘protest paradigm’ may vary across research, but the underlying assumption is that this type of news coverage presents social movements as a threat to the status quo in order to marginalize them. In the following section I provide an overview of studies dealing with the media treatment of social
movements.
THE PROTEST PARADIGM
Media are important for social movements to get their message across. But the frames employed by demonstrators may be misunderstood or even disregarded by journalists (Gitlin, 1980). One of the milestones in social movement studies is Gitlin’s (1980) analysis of the media
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coverage of the anti-Vietnam students’ movement. By means of a qualitative method including interviews with activists and reporters and media content analysis, Gitlin found a clear pattern in the way media portrayed the movement. At the beginning they ignored the protests. Eventually, news coverage increased, but only to demonize the movement.
Building on this study, Chan and Lee (1984) coined the ‘protest paradigm’, a type of news coverage that “contains consistent patterns, beginning with criticism of protesters and protest groups-such as an emphasis on protesters' unusual appearances” (e.g. their age, language, dress, goals), or on the presence of extremists among them (Di Cicco, 2010, p. 136). In addition, media emphasise “dramatic events and images such as violent conflict between protesters and police and other counter-normative actions”; they give voice to official sources to interpret the movement and its instances; they feature negative comments of the public opinion to marginalize demonstrators (Di Cicco, 2010, p. 136). In the end, such coverage aims at presenting demonstrators as deviant from the status quo. These characteristics of social movements’ news coverage have been found also in other studies. Brasted (2005) for example, analysed news coverage of student movements in the 1960s by NYT and Chicago Tribune. Although “not every article contained all the
characteristics of the protest paradigm […] taken as a collective, the coverage of the demonstrations and the movement had a cumulative effect of framing the events” as a battle between demonstrators and police, overshadowing the movement’s instances (p. 22). The focus on the what instead of the why is due to journalists’ inability to “understand or know how to convey to the public the ideology of the movement” (p. 6).
This media treatment has important consequences on how protests are perceived by the public.
Two studies have shown that “negative portrayals of social protests and movements may predispose the audience to resist social protest as a viable form of democratic expression” (McLeod, 1995, p. 4). The first experiment found that those who were exposed to TV coverage favouring the police were more critical of the social movements than those exposed to a more balanced news
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piece. This experiment was further developed to control for individual differences of the
participants (McLeod & Detenber, 1999). Three news stories were administered, all critical towards the social movement but with different degrees of status quo support. The higher the level of status quo support the smaller the public support for demonstrators. Ultimately, this kind of media coverage might also activate a sort of spiral of silence, which reduces the public’s willingness to take action themselves (McLeod, 1995).
Although “the majority of protest forms we see today are conventional; that is, peaceful, orderly routines that break no laws and violate no spaces” (Tarrow, 1994, p. 110), media continue to focus on the violent aspects of social movements. Boykoff (2006), for instance, analysed newspaper and TV coverage of the Global Justice Movement through inductive coding. He found that “even when protesters did not actually perpetrate violence the frame remained in place, as journalists remarked on the lack of destruction, the absence of violence or the potential for violence” (p. 211), suggesting the idea that riots are a natural part of protests.
This founding is in line with Shoemaker’s study that there is no inherent deviant movement, but “it is possible that journalists may create deviant groups by the ways in which they treat the groups” and hence “affect the reader's perception of the groups” (1984, p. 67). The more deviant the political group is perceived, the more journalists will marginalize it. If a political group breaks away from the status quo, media would not treat it as a legitimate political actor. As a consequence, “the groups opportunities to reach their goals are decreased” (p. 66). The research does not provide any causal relationship, but gives “some support to the theory that the media act as agents of social stability” (p. 72).
In fact, because of their ties with power structures, media act as ‘guard dogs’ and often cover protest from the perspective of those in power (McLeod & Detenber, 1999). They use official sources to “add prestige to a story, to increase the efficiency of news production, and to maintain the illusion of objectivity” (McLeod & Detenber, 1999, p. 6) and they “adapt a ‘protesters vs. police news frame […] because a group that challenges government policy is political, while a group that
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challenges police is criminal” (McLeod, 1995, p. 6). In this way they delegitimise and neutralise potential threats to the status quo.
This ‘guard dog’ role is generally undertaken by mainstream media. In their media coverage analysis of three anarchist marches in the US, McLeod and Hertog (1992) found out that
mainstream media aimed at marginalizing and isolating the protesters from the general public and discouraging further participation by using official sources and statements by bystanders and public opinion complaining about the violation of social norms or the annoyance caused. They framed the protests as a failure to change policy. Alternative media, on the contrary, presented the marches as an opportunity to express opinions and contribute to democracy.
The same conclusions were reached by Harlow and Johnson (2011) in their study of the Arab Spring’s news coverage. While NYT’s coverage included many characteristics of the ‘protest paradigm’, both the Twitter account of a NYT’s reporter and Global Voices, a citizen media site, showed more sympathy with the demonstrators and a deeper analysis of their demands.
The majority of research on social movements comes from the US, which has a market-driven media system, more inclined to spectacularization, and it is focused on mainstream media (Wouters, 2015). Yet, the rise of internet and social media has made it easier for protesters to spread their message and facilitate citizens’ mobilization (Cottle, 2008; Lee, 2014) and media can
sometimes favour those protests which are more in line with their ideology (Van Zoonen, 1992). For example, Lee (2014) analysed news coverage of 10 years of social protests in Hong Kong. He found out that when “the political system itself does not enjoy the support of a strong social consensus”, protesters may be depicted as representative of the general public and therefore they are not delegitimized (p. 2740).
The studies reviewed so far have primarily focused on how the demonstrators are portrayed instead of which claims they were raising. Yet, one recent study, specifically dealing with episodic and thematic frames, found that TV coverage of different protests in Belgium was predominantly thematic, that is, it gave major space to the demonstrators’ instances (Wouters, 2015).
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In sum, the most recent studies and those which are not US-based, seem to point to a
conditionality of the ‘marginalization coverage of social movements’. It is not yet clear whether this is a general tendency or it has to do with the specific characteristics of the country’s media system or of the social movement analyzed. Therefore, context-specific studies may lead to different result.
MOVEMENT PARTIES
Since they are not always visible in the political arena, “coalitions of activists who emanate
from social movements [may] try to apply the organizational and strategic practices of social movements in the electoral arena” (Hutter, Kriesi & Lorenzini, n.d., p. 2) and constitute movement parties. All these movement parties have one thing in common: they aim at representing certain issues that are neglected by mainstream parties but are important for society at that time (Kitschelt, 2006). Some examples can be mentioned. In the 1990s, the case of the Green parties in Europe and that of the indigenous movements in Latin America. More recently, the anti-austerity movements in the South of Europe have become what Hutter, Kriesi and Lorenzini (n.d.) call ‘hybrid
organizations’, that is, anti-party parties that are against the established party system in its entirety. They include in this category the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) in Italy and, I would add, Podemos in Spain.
As I have already pointed above, there are no studies that compare the media coverage of the social movements and its related party. This happens because “usually, social movement
scholars focus on the protest arena and do not pay much attention to the electoral channel”, as social movements of the left privilege the protest arena and those of the right engage directly with the electoral competition (Hutter & Kriesi, 2013, p. 281). Media studies on new political parties are scarce too. The majority of studies available have so far focused on the right-wing populist parties in the North of Europe (see for example Bos, van der Brug & de Vreese, 2010; Herkman, 2015). The subject of this study, Podemos, is also considered a populist party (Iniesta, 2016; Ramiro & Gómez, 2017; Zarzalejos, 2016), but of a different kind: left populist parties, in fact, “fuse populism with a political platform and political themes that are usually associated with socialist or social
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democratic parties” (Zaslove, 2008). Podemos itself refers to Laclau’s definition of populism: “the key to re-creating this new political subject, the people, would be to signal a series of unfulfilled popular demands that are not being addressed by ‘the system’” (Iniesta, 2016, p. 258). Nevertheless, it seems like both mass media and established parties try to prevent a new party from succeeding by ignoring or ridiculing it “or by depicting its project as subversive and dangerous, immoral, too expensive or simply impossible to realize” (Lucardie, 2000, p. 181). Yet, once the new party has entered the parliament, it may well receive the same media treatment as any other established political actor (Herkman, 2015; Stewart, Mazzoleni & Horsfield, 2003). Therefore it seems that media tend to marginalize non-institutionalized political actors, be they social movements or new parties.
MAKE A MOVE: TRANSFORM INDIGNATION IN POLITICAL CHANGE
The 15M movement did not appear overnight. Spain was facing a huge economic crisis and in February 2011, the Socialist government had approved important budget cuts (Castells, 2012). On May 15, to express their discontent, Spaniards occupied over 100 plazas across the country. This anti-austerity movement had at its core a “project of a popular reclaiming of citizenship, as a response to the condition of social distress caused by the 2008 financial crisis” (Gerbaudo, 2017, p. 37). The economic crisis and related phenomena were considered the result of political decisions taken by corrupt and careless political elites at the service of the bankers. The goal of 15M was to make the institutions responsive to the citizens through instruments of participatory and direct democracy (Gerbaudo, 2017).
The movement had a wide public support and it is believed to have inaugurated a new political cycle in Spain (Castells, 2012; Martínez & Domingo, 2014). Paradoxically, in spite of its distrust in political institutions, 15M inspired the creation of new parties (Romanos & Sádaba, 2015). Among them, Podemos was the most successful. Its intention was to act as an ‘institutional interface’ of 15M and expand its impact (Martínez & Domingo, 2014).
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At its early stages, Podemos can be considered a movement party, more a platform than a traditional party, and it presented itself as the party of the indignados (Torreblanca, 2015). 15M and Podemos shared the call for political change and the use of digital tools and discussion for inclusive participation (instead of the plazas, the circulos). Nevertheless, after this link had been established, the party was given a hierarchic structure and a strong leadership to govern institutions, leading to “the restriction of the original ideas of inclusion, openness and deliberation” for the sake of
electoral efficiency (Marzolf & Ganuza, 2015, p. 101-102). I hence focused my analysis on the first year of Podemos, when it was still a movement party, more similar to 15M than to an established political party.
HYPOTHESES
In order to compare 15M and Podemos’s news coverage, I developed a series of frames and hypotheses. Given the scarcity of media studies on new parties, and the continuity between the social movement and the party (Lobera, 2015), I assumed the same frames developed for 15M would be also valid for Podemos. Specific episodic and thematic frames were used for the analysis.
The episodic frames were mainly based on the research on social movements and populism reviewed in the above sections, and they focus on details, behaviour and appearances of the actors considered (Wouters, 2015).
The episodic frames were deviance, violence and crime, and populism.
Deviance combined the main characteristics of the protest paradigm as operationalized in the research discussed in the literature review (see, among others: Chan & Lee, 1984; Dardis, 2006; Gitlin, 1980). It included, for example, the description/mocking of participants’ age, language, dress; the focus on internal division and the presence of extremists and provocateurs; the underestimation of the number of participants and of the effectiveness of their goals; the use of witnesses or polls to express public disapproval; present the movement or the party as a threat to democracy.
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Violence and crime is one of the main characteristics of the protest paradigm as well. Nevertheless, since “it is common for journalists to use a violent crime story narrative” (McLeod & Detenber, 1999, p. 5) that “make(s) protesters appear more deviant and countersocietal” (Dardis, 2006, p. 120), I decided to analyse this frame separately from deviance. Violence and crime hence included: violent confrontation with the police; episodes of criminality by activists, such as the illegal occupation of public or private spaces (see, e.g., Dardis, 2006). To ensure that this frame could apply also to the party, I included another operationalization drawn from research on Podemos (see, for example, Torreblanca, 2015). Hence this frame was also present when scandals/wrongdoings by members of Podemos were addressed.
As mentioned before, both 15M and Podemos can be considered populist actors strictu sensu, as the ‘people’ has centre place in their political discourse (Gerbaudo, 2017). Yet, the word populism is often used in a negative and marginalizing sense. My operationalization of the concept was hence twofold: it included the populist claims raised by 15M or Podemos and their
correspondent media treatment. For the former, I relied on the work of Bos, van der Brug and de Vreese (2010). They focus on the style and substance of populism: “characteristic of the populist message is its hostility to representative politics and the established order and its identification with the united/our/ordinary people. As a result, when populists engage in politics they employ the language of the common man in order to eschew the ‘elitist’ complex language of representative politics” (p. 144). Therefore the populism frame included the discourse people vs. elites and
references to the common man and the pueblo. For the media treatment, I included those keywords and stereotyped images that attached a negative meaning to populism or openly criticized populist standpoints. For example, since some members of Podemos had worked for Latin American
regimes, the word ‘chavismo’, as a form of populism, was often use to stigmatize the party’s claims (Torreblanca, 2015). The populism frame can also be ascribed to the episodic coverage, as the focus is on the slogans which overshadow the substantive messages of the movement or the party.
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Thematic coverage, instead, deals with the specific claims raised by the protesters/party, the broader causes behind them and their possible solutions (Wouters, 2015). As mentioned before, 15M was a political movement originated by the economic crisis (Gerbaudo, 2017). Therefore I expected three main thematic frames to be used: politics, economic and social policies. These frames were also developed on the basis of the analysis made by Martínez and Domingo (2014) of the claims put forward by 15M (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Demands raised by 15M
Source: Martínez and Domingo (2014, p. 18)
Therefore, politics included, among others, the following claims: improvement of participatory democracy; reform of the electoral system; control and punishment of corruption; effective warranties of citizens liberties; sovereignty of the autonomous communities.
The economics frame covered instead the following pleas: public control of the banks; social audit of the public debt; implementation of non-recourse debt in mortgages; a progressive fiscal system; measures to face unemployment and the economic crisis in general.
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Lastly, the social policies frame dealt with these specific requests: derogation of the labour and pension reforms; non privatisation of public services; no cuts in the Welfare State; stop
evictions of foreclosed principal homes (‘desahucios’); provide affordable and decent housing for everyone; guarantee an unconditional basic income.
These three categories should also include all the possible issues a political party may
address in its program and other scholars have pointed out that many of these issues were tackled by Podemos as well (Gerbaudo, 2017; Torreblanca, 2015).
As both the movement and the party challenge the status quo, I expected they had received the same marginalizing coverage, even though the frequency of the single episodic frames might vary across the political actors:
H1 Episodic frames are more frequent than thematic frames in the news coverage of both 15M and Podemos.
Spain has a Mediterranean media system, with high levels of political parallelism and a ‘sacerdotal orientation’ towards the political elite (Albæk, van Dalen, Jebril & de Vreese, 2014; Hallin & Mancini, 2004). This has further been showed by Baumgartner and Chaqués Bonafont (2015). They discovered that there was no substantive difference in the news coverage of the main political parties by El País and El Mundo. This because Spanish “newspapers are more and more controlled by political institutions” (Baumgartner & Chaqués Bonafont, 2015, p. 270). Yet, their analysis did not include non-institutionalised actors. In the latter case, the political leaning of the newspapers might have a greater role in their news coverage. As 15M and Podemos are left-leaning political actors, I expected the left-leaning newspaper to give more space to the their claims. This led to the following hypothesis:
H2 Thematic frames are more frequent in the news coverage of 15M and Podemos by El País than in the news coverage by El Mundo.
Finally, one way of delegitimizing a new social actor is by giving voice mainly to official sources over representatives of the movement/party (see, among others, Gitlin, 1980; Harlow &
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Johnson, 2011). Since Spanish media “give a great deference to ‘official’ sources’” (Baumgartner & Chaqués Bonafont, 2015, p. 269), one may already expect them to be the most quoted in the news articles. Therefore, in my research, I took a different approach and checked whether non-official sources were quoted at all. By non-official sources I meant members of the social movement or the party, their supporters and common citizens. While I expected that few non-official sources were present in 15M’s news coverage, it was less clear cut for Podemos, as its leader and members had a strong communication strategy both online and offline (Casero-Ripollés, Feenstra & Tormey, 2016). This reasoning brought to the following expectation:
H3 Non-official sources are more present in Podemos than 15M’s news coverage
These three hypotheses were formulated in order to answer the following research question: RQ: How do news frames change when social movements become political parties?
METHODOLOGY
To test these hypotheses, I conducted a quantitative news content analysis of newspaper articles. As quality newspapers are considered elite media, which “tend to be more aligned with the status quo […] in terms of their support for mainstream political parties” (Mazzoleni, 2004, p. 3), I expected them to be more critical towards new political actors that might threat the established political system. I selected the two main Spanish newspapers2, El País and El Mundo, respectively centre-left and centre-right leaning so to compare news media coverage across the political
spectrum. Their articles were available on LexisNexis. The timeframe to retrieve articles about 15M was May 15 2011, when protests took place in 50 cities across Spain3, until May 16 2012, the day
after the manifestations to commemorate the anniversary of the movement (Lopez & Domingo, 2014). As for Podemos, the timeframe was from January 12 2014, when the party was founded, until the day after the demonstration Marcha del Cambio, organized by the party, that took place in Madrid on January 31 2015. In this period, Podemos’s organization and structure resembled more that of a social movement than of an established political party (Torreblanca, 2015). This should
2http://ejc.net/media_landscapes/spain
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make the media coverage of Podemos more comparable to that of 15M. In addition, already two scandals had hit two important figures of Podemos, thus affecting the image of a party which intended to build its reputation on being unaffected by corruption unlike the main parties PP and PSOE (Blanco Valdés, 2015). The timeframes for 15M and Podemos were roughly the same, around 1 year.
Since the words indignados and podemos are quite recurrent in Spanish, there was an extensive amount of articles available. To avoid unrelated articles, the following keywords were used: for the movement, indignados (at least 5 occurrences) or 15M (everywhere); for the party, Podemos (at least 5 occurrences) and Pablo Iglesias (everywhere), the leader of the party.
The sample was further narrowed down by grouping duplicates with high similarity on LexisNexis. In the end, 252 articles by El País and 180 by El Mundo were available on 15M, while 292 by El País and 296 by El Mundo were about Podemos. For all the topics, the desired sample was 90 articles. They were retrieved by means of systematic random sampling: every 3rd article in all cases except articles on 15M by El Mundo, every 2nd article. The articles on 15M by El País were 84. Since the number of available articles was even, the second sampling was made with a different method (every 2nd article) to reach 90 articles. All the articles were retrieved starting from the most recent ones. During the coding, articles that were not related to 15M or Podemos’s actions or opinions or did not provide an opinion about them, were excluded as well (e.g. Bruce
Springsteen paying tribute to 15M in Sevilla).
The inter-coder reliability was tested on 20% of the full sample. Hence, 18 articles were randomly selected per condition (15M*El País and El Mundo; Podemos*El País and El Mundo). In total, the reliability sample counted 72 articles. This method was used to guarantee that all types of articles were included in the analysis. Two coders performed the task, myself and another coder selected for his native knowledge of Spanish.
As it can be seen in Table 1, Krippendorff’s Alpha score was around 0.80 in all the items, which can be considered a satisfactory result. The lower scores of economics and social policies
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frames might be due to a possible overlapping between the two frames as a consequence of the description provided in the codebook.
The final sample analysed included 316 articles, equally distributed among newspapers, as it can be seen in Table 2. Nevertheless, there was a slight difference in the number of articles about 15M and Podemos (Table 3). The discrepancy is due to the characteristics of the sample: many articles about 15M did not provide an account of the movement’s actions or opinions, nor the opinion of other actors about it. Since these articles were just mentioning the movement, they were taken out of the analysis, as specified in the codebook’s instructions.
19 RESULTS
A preliminary interesting finding regards Podemos’s news coverage. In the months prior to the 2014 European elections, only four articles, all by El Mundo, were dedicated to the new born party, none of them dealing with its institution in January. These results may be due to the stringent selection criteria applied to retrieve the articles, but they might point as well to a tendency to ignore and underestimate Podemos. However, these articles were not part of the final sample analysed.
Also interesting to note is that only 7.4% articles about 15M contained no frame at all (11), while 23.4% of the articles about Podemos did not contain any frame (39). As Podemos was formalizing as a political party, those articles were merely detailing the process to become a territorial-based party, decide the leadership, the structure of the party, the electoral alliances etc.
This study focuses on whether there is a difference in the news coverage of a social movement and the party born out of it. H1 stated that episodic frames were more frequent than thematic frames for both 15M and Podemos. Table 4 shows already that this hypothesis is supported. The pattern is even clearer in the case of Podemos, where less than half of the articles analysed contained at least one thematic frame. Also, 15M’s articles had more frames overlapping, thus suggesting that the movements’ media coverage was more nuanced.
In addition, I conducted chi-square tests to look for variance within the samples. As for the episodic frames, two of them showed significant difference: the violence and crime frame was more
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present in the news coverage of 15M, χ2 (1, N = 316) = 61.906, p = .001 (Table 5), while the reverse is true for the populism frame χ2 (1, N = 316)= 7.890, p = .005 (Table 6). The deviance frame, instead, showed no variance across actors, χ2 (1, N = 316) = .098, p = .755.
Among the thematic frames, instead, only social policies showed variance among the two actors: χ2 (1, N = 316) = 30.803, p < .001 (Table 7). Nor politics, χ2 (1, N = 316) = 0.241, p = .623,
nor economics, χ2 (1, N = 316) = 0.916, p = .339, presented such a difference.
H2 claimed there was a variance in the news coverage by El País and by El Mundo, namely that the left-wing newspaper would make more use of thematic frames for both 15M and Podemos.
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This hypothesis was not supported. All the chi-square tests performed on 15M returned ps > .05, meaning the news coverage of El País and El Mundo were quite similar.
As for Podemos, only the politics frame showed a variance across newspapers, χ2 (1, N =
167) = 15.963, p < .001, which is not enough to infer that El País gave more space to the thematic frames than El Mundo (see Table 8). Among the episodic frames, only violence and crime presented a variance, χ2 (1, N = 167) = 4.802, p = .03 (Table 9), although less than 10 articles presented this
frame: a bigger sample might have showed no variance between newspapers.
Lastly, H3 assumed that non-official sources would be more present in the media coverage of Podemos compared to that of 15M. This hypothesis is also rejected, as χ2 (1, N = 316) = 1.558 with p = .212 (Table 10).
22 DISCUSSION
This study analysed whether news coverage changes when a social movement becomes a political party. In short, it can be said that there are no substantial changes. Following previous research on social movements (see, among others: Gitlin, 1980; Brasted 2005), media coverage of 15M was predominantly marginalizing, as that of Podemos, given the prevalence of episodic frames over thematic ones. In particular, the deviance frame, which was constructed on the base of the ‘protest paradigm’, was the most recurrent one.
Differences were found in the two other episodic frames, though. As it could be expected, the violence and crime frame was more present in 15M’s coverage. Yet, it was present in
Podemos’s articles as well, mainly those by El Mundo. The main reason is that, between December 2014 and January 2015, the number 2 and 3 of Podemos, Íñigo Errejón and Juan Carlos Monedero,
were invested by personal scandals. The accusations were fiscal fraud in the case of Monedero, while Errejón had supposedly breached a university contract. Both allegations were archived45, but more ‘scandals’ followed. El Mundo was the one giving most resonance to these scandals as, since it was founded, it has always acted like the watchdog of the Spanish politics, uncovering political wrongdoings (Baumgartner & Chaqués Bonafont, 2015).
The other difference regards the populism frame. Both actors can be considered populist strictu sensu, as ‘the people’, meaning the citizens, and their rights were the centre of their
4http://www.abc.es/espana/20150731/abci-monedero-fraude-fiscal-201507311620.html 5http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2016/06/07/actualidad/1465314127_393063.html
23
discourses (Gerbaudo, 2017; Torreblanca, 2015). Yet, the frame was more present in Podemos’s news coverage. Several possible explications apply here. First, Podemos explicitly used a more populist language compared to 15M, e.g. the continuous use of the word casta, created by two Italian journalists, to address the established, corrupt, political parties (Torreblanca, 2015). Second, the leaders of Podemos had worked as policy advisors for South American regimes, to the point that they even praised Chávez at an early stage of their political adventure and they still look favourably at the new populism that has developed in Latin America: a leftist populism which focuses on social rights and presents politics as the fight between an entire nation against the elites (Torreblanca, 2015). Because of this discourse, Podemos’s members were not only disdainfully addressed as populistas but also as chavistas, to underline that they represented a threat to democracy as the Venezuelan regime. Here lies also one limitation of this study, as it would have been interesting to look separately whether media were reporting populist discourses of 15M and Podemos or
accusations towards them of being populist. This type of analysis might have shown, for example, that 15M was not accused of being populist as much as Podemos.
Although the difference was not statistically significant, thematic frames were slightly more present in 15M’s news coverage than in Podemos’s (Table 4). This is probably due to the
uncertainty showed by Podemos in its first year of life, providing that it started to fully organize as party only in November 2014, as many of the articles analysed detailed. The party mainly focused on the economy because the enduring crisis was the major concern of the Spanish electorate. This is the reason why discussion of social policies was almost absent in Podemos’s coverage. On the contrary, it was the most present thematic frame for 15M. It may have to do with the specific focus of the indignados on social rights, as they engaged in demonstrations and protests against evictions and initiatives to help the unemployed (Martínez & Domingo, 2014).
Surprisingly, non-official sources were fairly represented in the articles analysed, with no substantial differences among 15M and Podemos. This seems to contradict Baumgartner and Chaqués Bonafont’s (2015) finding that Spanish media “give great give a great deference to
24
‘official’ sources’” (p. 269). To be precise, though, I only detected whether non-official sources were quoted at all. It still has to be seen how many non-official sources were quoted per article and whether their frequency was similar to those of official sources.
On the contrary, Baumgartner & Chaqués-Bonafont’s (2015) findings that El País and El Mundo’s political news coverage do not differ substantively is confirmed by this study, as there was almost no variation across newspapers. It might have to deal with the owners of these two
newspapers, holdings of banks and investment groups, that have a dependent relationship with the government (for more details on El País and El Mundo’s media ownership, see Almirón, 2009).
CONCLUSIONS
The results of the present study confirm the research on social movements while opening new insights for studies on political parties, particularly the populist ones. They seem to corroborate Shoemaker’s (1984) analysis that mass media marginalize, and do not treat as legitimate political actors, those political groups that break away from the status quo. Yet, while attention for social movements eventually fades away, that for political parties increases. It has to be seen, then, whether Podemos’s negative news coverage continued or, as it has happened for populist parties in Northern European countries, the media coverage has changed and the party has been treated as any other established political actor once in parliament (Herkman, 2015; Stewart, Mazzoleni &
Horsfield, 2003).
Despite the interesting findings, this study has several limitations. First, it is a single-country study. It has the merit to go into deep and serve well the exploratory purpose I had in mind, but it remains to be seen to what extent these results can be generalized to other countries: first, such a link between a social movement and a political party is not so common or clear to be found; second, the different media system may have a great role in influencing how these actors are covered.
Other limitations concern methodological choices. I only selected the first year of both actors, to check how they were ‘welcomed’ by the media. A more extended timeframe would probably have led to less news coverage on 15M. On the contrary, news coverage about Podemos
25
intensified and became more negative: as the party gained in vote intentions, Spanish media started to point to the instability it would cause to the democratic system (Teruel, 2016, p. 216).
Other media could have been analysed. For example, TV is the preferred medium to get political information in Spain (Teruel, 2016, p. 209) and in recent years it has been increasing the amount of political content (e.g. the channel La Sexta has up to 6 daily hours dedicated to politics). Podemos itself has made an extended use of TV, even before it constituted as a party, as its leader Pablo Iglesias, was often a guest of several talk shows and even run his own TV program, La Tuerka (Torreblanca, 2015).
Yet, the numerous scandals and cases of corruption, have increased the politicization of Spanish citizens (Teruel, 2016), who seek different sources of information. Out of the distrust for traditional media, as also expressed by 15M (Castells, 2012) and later reiterated by Podemos (Torreblanca, 2015), more than 300 journalistic start-ups have appeared in the Spanish media system6: among others, the progressive digital newspapers eldiario.es, Público, Infolibre and the centre-right El Confidencial, all of them with the common goal of uncovering political scandals. Their audience online is on the rise, eldiario.es, for example, reached 5,381,087 unique readers in December 2014 (Teruel, 2016, p. 215). As it has been showed in other research (Harlow & Johnson, 2011; McLeod & Hertog, 1992), these alternative media may have covered 15M and Podemos differently to the newspapers analysed in this study, by giving more space to their demands.
Because of their distrust of traditional media, both 15M and Podemos used social media to communicate directly with citizens. Another line of research could then look at the other side of the communication process: how citizens commented on social media (Twitter, Facebook), or, more in general, what was their perception of 15M and Podemos after consuming related media content.
Future research should hence focus on different kinds of media and on cross-country
analysis. Still, despite the limitations, this research provides in-depth knowledge about a case not so much explored in media analysis, that of movement parties’ news coverage, which can shed a light
26
on the relationship between social movements and parties. It also has important societal
implications. Newspapers were critical of 15M and Podemos in spite of the large public support for both the movement (Castells, 2012) and the party7. Eventually, such negative portrayals might
decrease, for these political groups, the chances to reach their goals and they might heavily
influence citizens’ opinion (Shoemaker, 1984), by reducing their willingness to actively take action in the political arena, either by joining protests or voting for a certain party (McLeod, 1995). On the contrary, media should give space to all kind of political actors in order to provide citizens with all relevant information and, consequentially, encourage their mobilization and participation
(Strömbäck, 2005). This is even more important for new political actors, which have to build their reputation and reach the public for the first time. If media provide a fair and balance coverage, these actors can communicate their true messages to citizens, which in turn can autonomously judge them. Otherwise, if their demands are neglected or distorted or if these actors are negatively portrayed by the media, they have less chances to reach both the public opinion and their goals. Eventually this will result in an uninformed/misinformed citizenship which is not able to make informed political decisions that best represent their interests and preferences.
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Appendix 1
Codebook
The topic analysed is media portray of a social movement, the 15M, and the party born out of it, Podemos. The unit of analysis are news article that deal with events, statements, actions interviews, comments about the 15M and Podemos.
The timeframe is 15 May 2011-16 May 2012 for the social movement. They are the start date of the movement and the day after the manifestations to commemorate its anniversary.
For the party, the timeframe was 12 January 2014-1 February 2015, from the foundation until 1 day after the Marcha del Cambio, from where the party started to be recognized as a true political contender.
Articles are available on LexisNexis. Since the words indignados and podemos are quite recurrent in Spanish, there was an extensive amount of articles available. The following keywords were used to retrieve the articles: keywords to retrieve articles were:
- For the movement, indignados (at least 5 occurrences) or 15M (everywhere)
- For the party, Podemos (at least 5 occurrences) and Pablo Iglesias (everywhere), the leader of the party.
The sample was further narrowed down by grouping duplicate articles with high similarity, a function of LexisNexis. In the end, 252 articles by El País and 180 by El Mundo were available on the 15M, while 292 by El País and 296 by El Mundo were about Podemos.
For all the topics, the desired sample was 90 articles. They were retrieved by means of systematic random sampling: every 3rd article in all cases except articles on 15M by El Mundo, every 2nd
article. The articles on the 15M by El País were 84. Since the number of available articles was even, the second sampling was made with a different method (every 2nd article) to reach 90 articles. All
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During the coding, articles that are not related to 15M or Podemos’s actions or opinions or do not provide an opinion about them, have to be excluded(e.g. Bruce Springsteen paying tribute to the 15M in Sevilla).
The context unit is the full news story, not including prior knowledge or links with earlier or later articles.
The coding is done sentence by sentence basing on the manifest content (no interpretation).
IDENTIFICATION
V1 Coder ID: NN (Initials of the coder) V2 Date: The date the article was published: Year = YY
Month = MM Day = DD
V3 Media Outlet: In which media outlet was the articles published: 1. El País 2. El Mundo V4 Article’sheadline Headline: V5 Journalistic genre The article is a:
1. news article= news item reporting about an event, detailed analysis of an issue, interviews 2. editorial, news analysis, opinion articles written by journalists or experts/academics etc. I excluded letter from the readers.
V6 Issue
35 15. 15M 16. Podemos V7 Non-official sources 1= presence 0= absence
The aim of this analysis is to see whether non-official sources are quoted in the news article and how many of them. Official sources are routinely used by journalists according to the beat they cover. Official sources include those individuals who hold a public office or are recognized experts about a certain topic (e.g. writers, university professors).
Hence, for the purposes of this coding, non-official sources are considered: -members of the 15M and/or Podemos;
-members/activists of other social movements; -common citizens.
From the category are also excluded actors, journalists, singers, sportsmen, other types of celebrities. If more than one non-official source is quoted, the next ones will be coded with their function. Max 10 non-official sources can be coded.
Definition of a source
Sources are: individuals/organizations indicated by name (Pablo Iglesias) or function/description (‘el líder de Podemos’) that are quoted or paraphrased.
Quoted sourcesignalled by presence of quotes “ ”
Paraphrased source expressions like “dice”, “cree”, - explicit reference to somebody’s words/thoughts or the position of a source. Actions taken by the source are not included. The same actor should only be coded once – although she/he/they may appear at several places and
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with different functions in the story (also in the form of a synonym – e.g. ‘Pablo Iglesias’ and ‘el líder de Podemos’ are the same actor).
Source: Source’s function/ description (given in the news article) The exact description of the actor used in the article has to be coded.
FRAMES
Multiple options are possible, frames are not mutually exclusive.
If the same frame is expressed more than once, it has to be coded only one time.
The coding is done sentence by sentence. Frames can be recognized in the text by the use of certain keywords, images etc. Some specific examples are provided in order to show what each frame is about and guide the coding.
V8 EPISODIC FRAMES
Episodic frame “depicts public issues in terms of concrete instances”, individual cases or events. It stops at the surface level and does not go into deep analysis.
Hence, the media coverage considered here is about mere descriptions of events, disregarding the claims raised by activists and party members.
V8a Deviance
1= Presence 0= Absence
The deviance frame combines the following categories. The articles:
• describe and/or make fun of participants’ age, language/messages, dress, physical apperance (e.g. Pablo Iglesias was addressed as ‘el coleta’; demonstrators by 15M were addressed as ‘perroflautas’; lack of clear message);
37
• underline the internal division and the presence of extremists and provocateurs;
• underestimate the number of participants (e.g. ‘demonstrators called for 100000 participants, 65000 according to other sources’) and the effectiveness of their goals (e.g. ‘how do they intend to reach what they are promising?’);
• point to public disapproval (e.g. use of witnesses, polls, citizens’ (negative) opinion on 15M or Podemos). By public disapproval I mean the one expressed by ordinary citizens;
• call the attention to the threat to democracy (e.g. the appearance of Podemos was considered a danger for the established two party-system, with negative consequences for
governability).
Code 1 if at least one of the above mentioned media treatments applies to the 15M or Podemos. Some more specific examples:
-“La patronal de comerciantes, la Confederación de Comercio Especializado de la Comunidad de Madrid (COCEM), criticó la posibilidad de que los manifestantes vuelvan a "montar un circo en pleno centro” has to be coded as deviance because it reports the negative point of view of
shopkeepers which suggests the idea of public disapproval. If the same plain negative comment is expressed by a politician, policeman or any other official source, it is not coded as deviance. Their comments have to be coded as deviance only when they fall in the other above mentioned
categories.
V8b Violence and crime 1= Presence
0= Absence
This frame includes the following categories:
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• Episodes of criminality (e.g. obstruct traffic; the acampadas are considered illegal, not authorized; arrests; assault to the Palau de la Generalitat in Barcelona etc.);
• Scandals/wrongdoings by members of Podemos (e.g. caso Monedero and Errejón)
Code 1 if at least one of the above mentioned media treatments applies to the 15M or Podemos. Some more specific examples:
-‘En uno de los vídeos que circulaban ayer por las redes sociales se veía a un agente antidisturbios reteniendo a una chica con el brazo a la espalda contra una pared’ has to be coded as it recounts of a violent eviction of protesters.
-‘Decenas de vecinos de Lavapiés comenzaron el verano encarándose a la policía en su barrio para evitar la detención de un joven senegalés’ does not have to be coded as violence as the neighbours were only protesting against the police without physical confrontation.
-“Como viene siendo habitual, los organizadores prescindieron de solicitor los permisos pertinentes” points to the lawlessness of the protesters, who do not seek permission for manifestations, therefore it has to be coded 1.
V8c Populism 1= Presence 0= absence
This frame is twofold: it includes the populist claims raised by the 15M or Podemos and the correspondent critique. The categories are:
• the discourse people vs. elites, the reference to the ‘man in the street’, ‘the common man’, ‘el pueblo’ the depiction of the political and economic elites as the enemy: (e.g. ‘la
dictadura de la finanza’; ‘la casta’; ‘no nos representan’; ‘somos el 99%’) as expressed by members of 15M or Podemos;
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• the expressed use of the words ‘populista’, ‘chavista’, ‘chavismo’, ‘hiperliderazgo’ to convey a pejorative meaning of populism, as expressed by any other actor or by the article itself.
Code 1 if at least one of the above mentioned media treatments applies to the15M or Podemos. Some more specific examples:
-’No somos mercancías en manos de políticos y banqueros’ has to be coded as populism because of the attack to politicians and bankers considered as elites.
-"Hay que favorecer el control del pueblo sobre las instituciones” has to be coded as populism because of the reference to ‘the people’.
V9 THEMATIC FRAMES
Thematic frames deal with the specific actions/claims raised by the protesters/party, the broader causes behind them and their possible solutions. For the purpose of this coding, I include only mentions to specific political, economic and social issues. For examples:
-‘los indignados lanzaron sus ideas sobre política (33%), economía (22%) y medio ambiente (15%)’ or ‘"las líneas principales del Consenso recaen en los aspectos que "más interés" suscitan en los ciudadanos…más justicia social y derechos sociales, económicos y culturales",must not be coded as thematic frames as they are macro-categories which do not deal with specific issues; -‘the indignados discussed health care cuts’ has to be coded as thematic (specifically, social policy).
The claims are coded as expressed by the 15M or Podemos’s members. Therefore, if another actor talks about a specific issue, the frame is present only if there is a reference to the movement or party. Some examples:
-The prime minister said: ‘We are still facing the consequences of the economic crisis’ must not be coded as economic frame, as there is no reference to either the 15M or Podemos.
