The Discursive construction of Tourism in the Spanish Press (Summer 2017)

Abstract

The discursive representation of tourism in press news is the objective of this contribution. Tourism and tourismphobia became particularly newsworthy during the summer of 2017 in the Spanish national press. The news stories have been analysed from different angles, both by communication professionals and discourse analysts. Our intention is to apply the paradigm of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) introduced and applied by Bednarek & Caple in a number of contributions that deal with news stories in the English press. Methodologically, we will apply Corpus Linguistics, adopting the principles of Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADs), introduced by Partington (2006), which has been applied, among other researchers, by critical discourse analysts in the study of the language of the press (see Baker et al., 2008; Baker et al., 2013). Our hypothesis is that news values are not simply news events, nor are they neutral, as many authors have pointed out. These news values exist as such in the discursive construction of the news by journalists. The analysis we have conducted reveals that the digital newspapers with the largest number of followers in Spain show preference for certain news values such as eliteness or proximity, together with an emphasis on impact, magnitude and negativity. Discursively, tourism and tourists are basically constructed as a threatened economic sector.