El espectáculo de la política en ‘El Hormiguero 3.0’ con los candidatos a la presidencia del Gobierno: 2015-2019

The infotainment is a key piece for political communication and the candidates tour the television sets showing their communication skills. Television entertainment programs such as Antena 3's El Hormiguero have taken advantage of this situation to develop a series of electoral interviews with the candidates for the presidency of the Government of Spain. This article will analyze these programs that have been broadcast during the electoral campaigns held between 2015 and 2019, both from their content and their structure. To carry out this research, the models framed in the quantitative paradigm have been used, focusing on descriptive questions from the content analysis adding the qualitative study of them. The programs that have been carried out in the electoral periods have maintained an identical structure in the interviews broadcast in each campaign prior to the elections so that all candidates were on an equal footing on issues related to current hot topics.

Reactive and Asymmetric Communication Flows: Social Media Discourse and Partisan News Framing in the Wake of Mass Shootings

Marked by both deep interconnectedness and polarization, the contemporary media system in the United States features news outlets and social media that are bound together, yet deeply divided along partisan lines. This article formally analyzes communication flows surrounding mass shootings in the hybrid and polarized U.S. media system. We begin by integrating media system literature with agenda setting and news framing theories and then conduct automated text analysis and time series modeling. After accounting for exogenous event characteristics, results show that (a) sympathy and gun control discourses on Twitter preceded news framing of gun policy more than the other way around, and (b) conservatives on Twitter and conservative media reacted to progressive discourse on Twitter, without their progressive counterparts exhibiting a similar reactiveness. Such results shed light on the influence of social media on political communication flows and confirm an asymmetry in the ways partisan media ecosystems respond to social events.

APROXIMACIONES A / DESDE LA SEMIÓTICA DE LA ACTUALIDAD

En esta sección monográfica se reflexiona acerca de la importancia de la semiótica como metodología para abordar fenómenos recientes como la pandemia por la COVID-19, los problemas de representación provocados por el patriarcado o el papel de las redes sociales en la comunicación política contemporánea. Asimismo, se aprovecha para reflexionar acerca de la propia disciplina y su relación con el concepto actualidad, dando como resultado seis contribuciones desarrolladas por especialistas internacionales del campo de la semiótica que iluminan con sus trabajos temas tan diversos como necesarios de reflexionar en nuestra contemporaneidad. Abstract: This monographic section reflects on the importance of semiotics as a methodology for approaching current issues, such as the pandemic caused by COVID-19, the problems of representation generated by patriarchy, or the role of social networks in contemporary political communication. It also represents an opportunity to reflect on the discipline itself and its relationship with the present. The results are six contributions developed by international specialists in the field of semiotics, who discuss about different central topics related to our contemporary world.

The Normative World of Memes: Political Communication Strategies in the United States and Ecuador

The media convergence model presents an environment in which everyone produces information without intermediates or filters. A subsequent insight shows that users (prosumers) —gathered in networked communities—also shape messages’ flow. Social media play a substantial role. This information is loaded with public values and ideologies that shape a normative world: social media has become a fundamental platform where users interact and promote public values. Memetics facilitates this phenomenon. Memes have three main characteristics: (1) Diffuse at the micro-level but shape the macrostructure of society; (2) Are based on popular culture; (3) Travel through competition and selection. In this context, this paper examineshow citizens from Ecuador and the United States reappropriate memes during a public discussion? The investigation is based on multimodal analysis and compares the most popular memes among the United States and Ecuador produced during the candidate debate (Trump vs. Biden [2020] and Lasso vs. Arauz [2021]). The findings suggest that, during a public discussion, it is common to use humor based on popular culture to question authority. Furthermore, a message becomes a meme when it evidences the gap between reality and expectations (normativity). Normativity depends on the context: Americans complain about the expectations of a debate; Ecuadorians, about discourtesy and violence.

ICYMI: RT and Youth-Oriented International Broadcasting as (Geo)Political Culture Jamming

Research in political communication has recently begun to explore the role of non-Western English-language state-funded international broadcasters (NEIBs) in influencing international audiences. Despite this, there has been little attention given to understanding how NEIBs engage and influence young people in ‘Western’ democracies. Our article addresses this gap by providing a detailed analysis of RT's English-language, youth-orientated news product ICYMI. Launched in 2018, ICYMI is a social media-based news brand that consists of a series of 2–3-min videos that deliver satirical takes on recent global events including military conflict, financial scandals, and culture clashes. Our findings, which examine the first year of the platform's activity, show that ICYMI is a novel form of engagement, one that is not easily categorised as either public diplomacy or propaganda, nor can it be described as traditional journalism. Instead, we label this approach as geopolitical culture jamming. In this article, we conduct a discourse analysis of 45 videos published on YouTube by ICYMI over its first year to examine how the platform attempts to influence how young people relate to traditional foreign policy discourses. Our empirical analysis centres on how viewers engage with and interpret ICYMI's videos with the aim of addressing how RT may be influencing younger audiences, particularly its core demographic of Anglophone white males whose comments reflect an attachment to ICYMI's populist, anti-elite worldview.

Ideological Manipulation in Twitter Communication: A Critical Stylistic Analysis of Donald Trump's Tweets

Donald Trump’s use of Twitter as a modality to defame opponents, antagonize media outlets and even glorify violence is an enduring legacy for political campaigns, presidential rhetoric and argumentative debates. This nontraditional use of social media as a political communication tool has invited Twitter’s fact-checking editorial decisions, alienated some of Trump’s supporters and attracted worldwide criticism. Using purposive sampling, the present paper employs the ten textual-conceptual functions of critical stylistics to analyze a dataset of Trump’s tweets on domestic and international political issues published between 2011 and 2020 and assembled from the monitor corpus Trump Twitter Archive. The critical stylistic analysis aims at uncovering Trump’s ideological outlook by identifying the extra layer of meaning in which the ideological evaluation is structured and exposing the way in which the resources of language are strategically deployed to influence and ideologically manipulate Trump’s followers’ experience of reality. Analysis reveals a network of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic choices underlying Trump’s seemingly simple rhetoric. It signposts his ideological evaluation and constructs a world for his followers to desire, believe or fear. The study extends the application of critical stylistics to microblogging channels, with implications both for the linguistic make-up of political communication in Web 2.0 contexts and for the explanatory power of critical stylistics.

Proposing a Three-Dimensional Normative Model for Political Communication

The last 10 years or more will be remembered as a time of perpetual crisis. Against this backdrop, there is an urgent need for effective leadership and for citizens of the world and their leaders to come together to achieve collective goals. However, various studies have highlighted the deleterious effects on democracy of the current trajectory political discourse is taking. Increasing voices in academia call for a shift towards a more citizen-centric political communication. The authors respond to such calls by proposing a new model for political communication that focuses on three dimensions, namely service ethos, inclusivity, and empathy (3D model). In this chapter, the authors conceptualise these dimensions and build a normative model for their application while discuss the relevant shortcomings and current issues as they relate to contemporary political communication.

Hardwired to attack. Candidates’ personality traits and negative campaigning in three European countries

A growing body of studies shows that the reasons for competing candidates to “go negative” on their opponents during elections—that is, attacking their opponents instead of promoting their own programs or ideas stem from strategic considerations. Yet, existing research has, at this stage, failed to assess whether candidates’ personality traits also play a role. In this article, we bridge the gap between existing work in political psychology and political communication and study to what extent the personality traits of competing candidates are linked with their use of negative campaigning strategies. We rely on candidate survey data for recent elections in three countries—Germany (2017), Switzerland (2019), and Finland (2019). The data includes self-reported measures for candidates’ “Big Five” personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness) and the the use of attacks towards their opponents during the campaign. Controlling for the usual suspects driving the use of negative campaigning we show that this latter is associated with low agreeableness and (marginally) with high extraversion and low conscientiousness. The role of personality for the focus of an attack (issue vs. character attacks) is somewhat less clear-cut. All in all, kinder and more stable candidates tend to go less negative; when they do, they tend to stay away from character-based attacks and somehow focus on issues.