Media coverage of Education for Citizenship in its historical and social context

Abstract

This paper summarizes a study of conservative media discourse on the debate surrounding the introduction of Education for Citizenship as a compulsory subject in Spanish school curricula. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of related coverage provided by Spanish dailies ABC and La Razón between 2004 and 2008 was performed with two objectives in mind. The first was to identify the dominant frames employed by both newspapers in their coverage of this issue. The second was to determine whether there were parallels between the ways in which social organisations protesting against the recent inclusion of civic education in school curricula framed their messages and the ways in which the Catholic press framed its discourse in opposition to measures related to education and religion during the Second Spanish Republic. Findings indicate that the coverage of the issue provided by the newspapers studied was framed to mobilise public opinion against civic education and that there were strong parallels between the messages it conveyed and those disseminated by the Catholic press in the 1930s.