La cobertura mediática de los conflictos armados

Abstract

Since the September 11 attacks, security issues have been embedded in the media routines of the world's mainstream media reporting on international affairs. This way of dealing with, managing and exposing information to the public is easily visible when the media report on the development of armed conflicts. In other words, several authors argue that there is a phenomenon of media securitization. Likewise, no one doubts that the information dimension of war conflicts has played an important role in their evolution. However, if we go to the specialized literature, we find two well-differentiated approaches. On the one hand, research framed within political communication, with a strong empirical component, which address issues such as the dehumanization of victims, the demonization of political leaders or the concordance between media discourses. And, on the other hand, works of international relations and strategic studies that pose information as a strategic entity on which one of the pillars of the relative power of state and non-state actors is based. However, it is still necessary to develop more applied studies with multidisciplinary theoretical frameworks in which both research areas converge. Therefore, the general objective of this doctoral thesis is to analyze whether this securitization process is also present within the Spanish media system. Specifically, this research aims to: (i) study and compare the incidence of security and human drama frames in reference newspapers in Spain; (ii) compare the use of frames in the media with different editorial lines and divergent ideological currents to clarify whether the ideology of the medium is a determining variable; (iii) explore whether the media securitization process is also identifiable within the so-called new media (specifically Twitter and YouTube); (iv) compare traditional media coverage with alternative media. The selected case studies represent some of the armed conflicts that have attracted the most media attention in the Spanish press in recent years: The civil conflict in Yemen (2015-2019), the war in the Donbass (2015-2019), the dynamics of violence within the Palestinian- Israeli conflict (2000-2019), the war in Syria (2011-2020), the Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan (2015-2020), the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno- Karabakh (2020) and the Libyan conflict (2018-2020). To achieve the different specific objectives and hypotheses, a multidisciplinary theoretical framework has been designed based on the postulates of framing theories (political communication) and the premises of the Copenhagen School (international relations). Regarding the methodological design, automated processing models have been used, specifically the supervised model SVM (Vector Support Machines) and the unsupervised model LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation). In short, techniques of the socalled Natural Language Processing. This doctoral thesis aims, in turn, to incorporate the use of computational science into the studies of media and conflicts, that are giving such good results in other areas of the social sciences. The main findings indicate that the security frame is predominant within the media routines of the Spanish media; leaving the news that refers to humanitarian issues in a very secondary place. Therefore, we can establish that the Spanish press has undergone a process of securitization when it reports on war. Likewise, it has been detected that the editorial line of the medium is not a determining variable in any case study except in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Also, it is evident how this securitization is rooted within other communication channels (YouTube and Twitter) and how the use of frames allows to establish if there is an unconventional behavior. This last aspect has made it possible to detect how certain media (foreign public property) do not follow the classic media routines of what is known as traditional media.