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In:Representing the Other in European Media Discourses
Edited by Jan Chovanec and Katarzyna Molek-Kozakowska
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 74] 2017
► pp. 135–154

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Chapter 6
Discursive legitimation of criminalization and victimization of sub-Saharan immigrants in Spanish El País and ABC newspapers

Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.74.07mar
Abstract
This chapter analyses some visual characteristics used to criminalize and victimize sub-Saharan immigrants in a sample from the Spanish press. It contributes to the debate on the discursive construction of “the other”, in this case, the sub-Saharan immigrant, in the quality Spanish press. The corpus consists of all the news items published on sub-Saharan immigrants in the digital editions of the two most popular Spanish newspapers, El País and ABC, from 1 January 2012 to 1 January 2015. Visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006) and the model proposed by van Leeuwen (1996, 2008) for the analysis of the representation of social actors is used to deconstruct the main visual strategies used by the Spanish press to criminalize and victimize immigrants in order to reinforce the us–them dichotomy and to legitimize the representation of sub-Saharan immigrants as “the others”. The main findings of the study show how immigrants are represented as criminals and victims, which does not favour their integration but contributes to the highlighting of racist attitudes and discrimination.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Analysis of the corpus
    • 4.1Strategies of criminalization
    • 4.2Strategies of victimization
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
References (40)
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Martínez Lirola, María
2022. Critical analysis of dehumanizing news photographs on immigrants: Examples of the portrayal of non-citizenship. Discourse & Society 33:4 ► pp. 478 ff. DOI logo
Alaazi, Dominic A., Alphonse Ndem Ahola, Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika, Sophie Yohani, Helen Vallianatos & Bukola Salami
2021. Immigrants and the Western media: a critical discourse analysis of newspaper framings of African immigrant parenting in Canada. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47:19 ► pp. 4478 ff. DOI logo
Arévalo Salinas, Alex Iván, Tamer Al Najjar Trujillo & Víctor Manuel Silva Echeto
2021. Representaciones de la inmigración en los medios informativos españoles y su visibilidad como fuentes informativas. Historia y Comunicación Social 26:1 ► pp. 153 ff. DOI logo
Corona, Víctor & David Block
2020. Raciolinguistic micro-aggressions in the school stories of immigrant adolescents in Barcelona: a challenge to the notion of Spanish exceptionalism?. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 23:7 ► pp. 778 ff. DOI logo
Chovanec, Jan
2019. Multimodal storytelling in the news: Sequenced images as ideological scripts of othering. Discourse, Context & Media 28 ► pp. 8 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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