Precarious Employment and Today’s Satirical Press: Representation of Interns in El Mundo Today

Abstract

From its beginnings, the Spanish satirical press has acted as a concave mirror that caricatures current issues. Thus, the crisis, controversies and changes experienced by society have been channeled in a humorous and burlesque tone throughout the pages of these publications, which have been adapting their contents to the needs of each historical moment. The present work seeks to study the mechanisms used by the current satirical press regarding one of the problems that most concern the contemporary citizenship: the employment precariousness. With this purpose, we addressed the image created by El Mundo Today —a publication characterized by fake news— of the interns, a precarious group whose presence in many companies has increased during the crisis due to cuts in their staff. In this way, we studied all the news about interns published in this digital newspaper from January 2009 until March 2017. We submitted these texts to a double analysis: a quantitative content analysis and an analysis of the discourse to extract the force-ideas from our corpus.