20th Century Spanish Journalism: A Historical Overview

Posted on Oct 1, 2024 in Social sciences

Journalistic Language and Functions

Journalism’s major functions are to inform, educate, and entertain. Information must be reliable, firsthand, sufficiently proven, and objective. Key characteristics include:

• The issuer is the newspaper company.
• The receiver is anonymous, multiple, and heterogeneous.
• Different codes are used: linguistic, typographical, and iconic.
• The message comprises both the specific content and the final aim.
• The situational context encompasses all circumstances relating to the subject.

However, journalism also has negative aspects:

• Simplification and deformation of content.
• Disregard for the heterogeneity of the audience.
• Conservative character and lack of criticality.
• Submission to consumer society principles.
• Power to impose ideology.
• Passive nature of reception.

Specific Language Features

Journalistic texts often exhibit specific language features, including:

• Improper lexicon usage.
• Excessive and inappropriate use of neologisms, foreign words, and barbarisms.
• Euphemisms and generalizations.
• Creation of new words through affixation and composition.
• Overuse of acronyms.
• Propensity for longer sentences.
• Abundance of the passive voice.
• Tendency to place the subject at the end.
• Mix of direct and indirect style.
• Use of barbarisms, Gallicisms, and Anglicisms.
• Periphrasis (estar + be + past participle).
• Elimination of prepositions.
• Conditional posibilidad.
• Rhetorical devices such as metaphors, metonymy, impersonations, and hyperbole.

Journalistic Genres

Informative Texts

These texts are characterized by objective information on current events, prevalence of narrative and descriptive modes, and an anticlimactic or pyramid structure.

1. News: Brief, concise, clear, objective, and impersonal accounts of recent events, starting with the most noteworthy aspect.
2. Feature: More detailed and objective development of a news story, often including quotes, interviews, and graphic information.
3. Interview: Dialogue-based, using direct question-and-answer style, sometimes interspersed with interviewer comments.

Opinion Texts

These texts have a freer structure, typically organized into introduction, data (arguments, judgments, opinions), and conclusion.

1. Editorial: A weighted reflection on a current issue, presenting different facets and possible solutions, representing the newspaper’s opinion.
2. Article: A personal opinion piece on a topic of interest, often starting with a factual statement.
3. Column: A regular, fixed-schedule opinion piece, often located in the same newspaper section.
4. Critique: An evaluative review of a cultural event, offering judgments from an expert perspective.
5. Letter to the Editor: A reader’s opinion on a topical issue, providing a platform for interaction between the public and the newspaper.

Hybrid Genres

Chronicle: It is considered a hybrid genre, halfway between information and opinion.
Ø Its structure is typical of the news genre, mode of discourse is the narration focused on the development process or events that are reported. An informative narration.
Ø is signed and is often the personal assessment by the appearance of evaluative adjectives, adverbs of manner, a figure of speech as the comparison or metaphor. There is a clear willingness by the issuer style
Ø The predominant function remains the representative, but the personal opinions enter the expressive function.
The news-comment .- It is one of the modalities used by the press today. Its function is to select and interpret a particular event. Signed usually appears as the journalist intends to give his personal stamp.
Has points of contact with chronicle, but differs fundamentally from the source of factual information, which is indirect in the case of news-comment.

SPANISH JOURNALISM IN THE CENTURY. XX
Spanish journalism until 1939 (end of the Civil War)
In the last years of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerged in the U.S. and some European countries a new generation of newspapers or the so-called New Journalism New Journalism, whose prime example was The World, the Pulitzer. They are the first newspapers of the masses. Dramatically increase their circulation, including many pages of advertising, set in large buildings and obtained a hitherto unsuspected benefits.
Qualitatively these newspapers abandon old formulas and are given new roles in society of the twentieth century. Become instruments of political and ideological social influence, but also in fixed assets and consumption that are sold at low prices and offer their readers an attractive and well finished. Arises in this context the tabloids, whose greatest representative was Hearst, with his New York Journal newspaper. This formula eventually fail, but many aspects of form and content have reached the print media today. Large economic benefits were these early newspapers of mass became the axis of powerful information monopolies (Pulitzer, Hearst, RCA, CBS)
In reaction to yellow also emerged around this time elite newspapers of general information which the model was the New York Time, daily created a new form of journalism, based on thorough documentation and analysis of the facts.
In Spain, although it remains in force the old model of political journalism, new media are defined as independent:
• The Fair (1867) whose literary supplement, The Fair Monday, published from 1879 to 1906, under the leadership of Ortega Munilla, plays the most important authors of the time: Zorrilla, Valera, Campoamor, Pardo Bazán, Rubén Darío. .. Monday of the Fair “to stardom” the most significant writers of the generation of 98: Unamuno, Azorín, Baroja, Valle Inclan …
• La Vanguardia (1881), Catalan newspaper created in 1881 by brothers Godo.
• ABC weekly founded by Torcuato Luca de Tena, in 1903, which in 1905 became Journal of monarchical and conservative ideology.
• The Sun, founded in 1917, Ortega y Gasset was a main intellectual inspiration, who also founded the Journal of the West that was a real renewal in the cultural and social life of the country.
They are business newspapers, who favor economic efficiency and use advertising as a primary means of funding. These newspapers have the same qualities and objectives that mass media but did not reach the long runs that characterized the foreign newspapers, due to the lack of a broad readership: Spain was still a sparsely urbanized, with high illiteracy rates.
But our newspapers have many traits of mass newspapers: in the texts and language use less convoluted and more agile and detected some lexical and stylistic renewal, the layout is more attractive and displayed photographs, their contents reflect the tastes of culture Mass: public entertainment (football, bulls, theater …), political acts, references to other media (print and film), section billboard, etc. Special pages also appear or supplements economy, entertainment, art, sport, agriculture, women and children. Moreover, the impact of the First World War to intensify interest in foreign issues.
In addition we should emphasize close relations and links between the press and literature: the great writers of the generation of 98 in 1914 and 1927 (Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Azorín, Antonio Machado, Ortega y Gasset …) not only published excellent articles in the press, but also in newspapers and magazines appeared serialized novels of Pio Baroja, Unamuno essays or poems by Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, Lorca, Alberti, Cernuda …
In 1936 Civil War broke out and the information disappeared in the two areas fighters to become blatant propaganda. On the Republican side, right-wing newspapers were seized and put to use on the Republican side. Proceeded the same way the side which had revolted against the Republic with the leftists. The Church put all his organization serving the propaganda of Franco and the Falange would have different publications. To raise the morale of enemy combatants and intimidate the regular season arise.

The Spanish press from 1939 to 1970
After the Civil War came the years of military dictatorship of General Franco maintained a constant obsession with control of the press and other media, but there are two periods:
 1939-1966 Prior censorship is applied with extreme rigor. Deletes all the media that had been linked to the Republic, are introduced in the texts and propaganda slogans designating the heads of all the newspapers.The press is monotonous, with no room for any criticism. There are three types of newspapers: the private property (such as ABC, La Vanguardia, etc.), Those in the Church (I) and the “movement” (Above, El Alcázar). Also remember the Pueblo newspaper, owned by vertical and school unions of many of the journalists who would play the renovation of the press during the transition.
 1966-1975. The second period began in 1966 with the approval of the Press Law, “Law Fraga” a relative openness of information: it began publishing information previously unthinkable (daily Madrid) and the official press was losing too much ground. Appear monthly and weekly magazines were less monitoring diaries and were instrumental in disseminating ideas about the necessary end of dictatorship: Notebooks for Dialogue, Triumph, Destiny and Change 16. Also proliferated celebrity magazines Hello, Ten Minutes, Readings, Week … and achieved significant success weekly event Case. Most popular sports newspapers As and Marca were.

The Spanish press from 1939 to 1970
In 70 starts a crisis which gives access to the information society in which we operate. The development of new technologies affects all media. Is a growing trend towards concentration of issuers. Information increasingly becomes a supranational phenomenon and there is a clear predominance of the agency and American television.
Many States privatize kept letting the public media controlled by big business groups. Increasingly becoming more important audiovisual market so that daily spread from the strength of the icon: the media, even the elite increasingly incorporate the look and color, there are new visual genres, such as computer graphics, and television transmission are included, even in serious newspapers, content roses
In Spain, after the democratic transition, the press experienced a boom with the appearance of publications of all kinds. In addition to newspapers with history, as the ABC and La Vanguardia, new ones appear as El Pais or El Mundo that become solid once in media companies and power groups. One attraction of these means is the list of editors and collaborators among those who have the most important writers of our time: Gala, Cela, Threshold, Delibes, Torrente Ballester, García Márquez, etc.
• Jaime Campmany, a popular style concentrated usual presence of cultured appointments, caricatured characters in the political and social life and wrote in The Truth and ABC, highlighting Articles Letters Batuecas and political scenes with his book I give my word.
• Francisco Umbral, renewal of journalistic language, stresses the accumulation of resources in their articles, treated as a subject’s own life, was critical of the regime and wrote in El Norte de Castilla, El Pais (in Diary of a snob and Memories a child of the century), Diario 16 (with gloves Journal) and The World.
• Antonio Gala, the most popular topics of human dignity, freedom, love, heartbreak and the passage of time and resources directed his thoughts to a particular partner and lady’s Notebook highlighted autumn. Dedicated to Tobias, who goes with me or Letter to the heirs. It also collaborates daily with a brief column in THE WORLD.

Text and properties: adequacy, coherence and cohesion

Textuality of a text is the set of conditions that guarantee their existence as such:

# FITNESS .- We understand adequacy compliance with regulations affecting the constitution of a text, whether related to the receiver, with the object or the situation. The general rules are as follows: a. Adaptation to the receiver, to their knowledge, their age, educational level, personal or social status. B. Appropriateness to theme or not wander out of the text object. C. Adaptation to the communicative situation, using the appropriate linguistic register (colloquial, formal, etc …).

For example Curran, make and carry out or draw may be synonymous in some contexts, but have different sociolinguistic values: the first is very colloquial, vulgar, and the second has no negative connotation, belongs to a familiar level of formality, and the last two formally marked and belong to a more educated and specialized registry. In a public display, FITNESS requires us to use the latter two to give a technical tone (complete the project, preparing the report), but also the neutral do (to the project and report). Instead currar only allow ourselves to say the survey and the report of a conversation between friends, very informal, because it does fulfill the principle of adequacy.

# COHERENCE .- The textual coherence is the property indicating the relevant information to be communicated and how it has to do (in what order and detail with the structure, etc.) Major features including textual coherence are:

> THE NUMBER OF INFORMATION: controls the relevant information for each type of communication, if given all the data you have to say, without having too much information (repetition, redundancy, irrelevant data, etc.) Or defects (gaps in meaning, too much data or implicit assumptions that the receiver does not dominate)

The selection of information to a text depends on contextual factors: the purpose of the issuer, prior knowledge of the recipient, the message type, conventions and routines.

> THE QUALITY OF INFORMATION: controls whether the ideas are clear and understandable, we present a complete, progressive and orderly manner, with appropriate examples, etc. Or, conversely, if detected dark ideas, lack of detail, too general statements and theoretical, or too anecdotal

To get the quantity and quality of information to function properly, there are a number of mechanisms:

A. – SUBJECT OR TOPIC .- It is that what is spoken or written and what should subordinate all and each of the sentences of the text.

B. – PRESUPPOSITIONS .- This is information that the sender of the text assumes you know the recipient. It is essential for a coherent text to the recipient that the sender has been successful in their assumptions.

C. – IMPLICATIONS .- This is additional information contained in a statement. A statement such as “closed door” contains at least three implications: a door, the door is open and the receiver is able to close it.

D. – KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORLD .- The coherence of a text also depends on general knowledge of our world with the transmitter and receiver. For example, a statement such as’ The Birds visit to the psychiatrist “contradicts our understanding of reality.

E. MARCO .- This is the type of text, purpose and the communicative situation in which it occurs. Depending on the context, a certain statement can be consistent, but clash with our general knowledge of the world. For example, the above statement, “The birds visit the psychiatrist” would fill a literary text coherence of aesthetic purpose as Joaquín Sabina’s song Let that speak of Madrid.

> ¨ THE STRUCTURE OF INFORMATION .- How to organize text information?, “The data is structured logically as a specific order (chronological, spatial, etc.)” Each idea is developed in a paragraph or a unit independent?, “New information is given progressively? Some of the important concepts for this section are:

# Macrostructure and SUPERSTRUCTURE: The macro is the semantic content of information, logically ordered, while lasuperestructura is the way it is presented in a given text information. For example, in the case of a traffic accident macrostructure logically ordered event data: the actors (drivers and their vehicles), the facts (the overtaking collision, etc.) Circumstances (speed, highway, etc.), causes (braking, sudden turning, etc.) consequences (bell lap, leaving the roadway, etc.).. If this fact appears in a newspaper, the text will probably superstructure media release, whereas if they are to present the same facts in a complaint, in an oral conversation or an instance to request something, the facts are sorted so vary according to the superstructure of each of these types of text: the complaint must contain the sections on copyright and allegations, the conversation will be a chronological narrative, and the instance of claims distinguish the states.

# The thematic progression (the concepts of theme and rheme) .- The concepts of theme and rheme in principle were applied to the sentence structures. Topic is the starting point of the statement known by the receiver is all that yrema provides new information, ie, provides the substance, what is really new information. The theme also called topical and rows is also called comment. Theme and rheme not always coincide respectively with the grammar of subject and predicate, but often correspond in a statement.

Anyway, the word order of a sentence often conditions the theme and rheme of the utterance. For example:

This situation occurs because the speakers turn to latopicalización, by which they can turn any element in a sentence temade: Eva was seen in the museum (redundant “the” = “Eva”) / / Yes, yes, they saw Eve in the museum (a verb becomes the subject of a statement).

.- # COHESION Cohesion is the grammatical dependency between the different units that compose a text. As in the case of consistency, there are a number of mechanisms that give coherence to this text:

> REFERENCE .- It is the mechanism for referring to something mentioned in the text or any element of the communicative situation. There are two types of reference:

Situational reference .- Some elements of the text refer to another element of the communicative situation that is not mentioned in the statement: I want that (pointing to an object present there).

Textual reference .- Some elements of the text refer to something already stated above (anaphora) or which are set after (the cataphoric). Pepe was late. He had missed the bus.

They were ALL there: Peter, Mary, John and Eva

In the above examples, a anaphoric element, while ALL is cataphoric.

> .- Deixis is a linguistic mechanism that indicates who (personal deixis), where (spatial deixis) and when (temporal deixis). The indexicals have a occasional meaning depends on each specific text (the deictic there can specify any location). The most common tools for deixis are:

· Deixis personal and possessive pronouns.

· Deixis space: demonstration and adverbs of place.

· Temporary Deixis: adverbs of time.

> REPLACEMENT .- Replacing an element with another: John drew a house. Peter drew SAME. The substitution is linked to or cataphoric anaphoric reference, as appropriate, is done primarily through the proforma or specialized elements in the role of substitute. Among them are:

1) PRO FORMA GRAMMAR:

· The pronouns, specializing in replacing nouns, pronouns (There was Mary, were happy / / Manolo shaved his beard), demonstrative, possessive, indefinite, relative, interrogative … (His face flushed / / many knew / / Who is the book?).

· The proadverbios. Specialized substitute or add circumstantial adverbs as in: “John lives there, says that” in the field

2) Lexical PROFORMA: nominal and verbal words are specialized in place. Also called wild words and may be nominal (thing, fact, matter, matter ,…) and verbal (especially the verb do).

> Ellipsis .- Omission of an element of the statement that is understood: Juan Pedro drew a house and a sheep.

> Isotopy .- This consists of the repetition of language units linked by their shape or meaning. Can be of three types: # Grammar: It consists in the repetition of elements in the same grammatical category (nouns, adjectives, etc …). # Semantic and lexical: it consists in the accumulation of words that belong to the same semantic field, or in repeating the same word or synonyms. # Phonics: This is the repetition of sounds.

> CONNECTORS .- The related words or expressions contained in the text. Connectors can function as conjunctions, adverbs or adverbial or conjunctive. The connectors can be expressed:

> ° discursive orders .- The connectors extraoracionales affecting parts of the text, for example, blocks, paragraphs, etc. The purpose of computers is explicit speech mode and order of the information inserted in the text or a script (To begin, first, second, finally, to conclude, finally, finally … ) Also in written texts play this role expressions like above, below, and then later … or direct references to sections or chapters.