Discursive Practices of Spanish Newspapers Regarding the Fragmented Government Measures in Battling Coronavirus

西班牙報紙針對政府對抗新冠病毒的破碎措施之論述實踐

10.3966/181147172021060025005

Francisco de Borja Navarro；Aiden Yeh

Coronavirus ； reopening ； Spanish government ； newspaper ； corpus discourse analysis ； 新型冠狀病毒 ； 疫情降級 ； 西班牙政府 ； 報紙 ； 語料庫言談分析

語文與國際研究

25期（2021 / 06 / 01）

123 - 150

英文

The Coronavirus, known as COVID-19, has become a global problem due to its capacity to spread rapidly and human-to-human contagion, provoking a world disorder. Almost every country in the world was not expecting the brutal impact that COVID-19 brought into their economy and the daily life of its citizens. Spain, one of the first European countries severely affected by COVID-19, was also one of the frontrunners that led the implementation of safety measures such as the national quarantine and at-home confinement. After its first national lockdown, the Spanish Government started to carry out a national re-opening divided in 4 phases, which apparently was confronted with a mixture of conflicting (re)views published in leading newspapers, i.e., those who supported and those who were against the measures adopted during reopening. By conducting a corpus-based discourse analysis of various labels used and their semantic and pragmatic implications by two leading newspapers (El País and El Mundo), this study aims to investigate their discursive practices and how different political ideologies influence the labels they use, and vice versa. The resulting corpus, which consists of 400 articles with 362,383 tokens in total, was created and collected in May 2020, corresponding to the first fifteen days of Spain's reopening. A corpus-based investigation of media presentations of news which included the selection and categorization of lexis and the focus of reporting during the coronavirus epidemic was conducted. Taking a sociocognitive approach (Van Dijk, 2008) as the theoretical framework, the results in this study show that both newspapers focused especially on the problems that Madrid, the Spanish capital faced, i.e., political disagreements regarding the central government's questionable reliability and their readiness to confront the second wave of the outbreak. Moreover, this study finds that El País showed a predisposition to victimize the actions of the Spanish Government, while El Mundo is more direct with their news reporting on disagreements over the reopening measures. The labels, comments and ways of delivering information created a sense of fear among the Spanish citizens and loss of their trust, thus further rejecting the government policies and efforts to prevent, control, and respond to the pandemic. These events resulted in social and political fractures that threaten the unity of the Spanish citizens while a strong negative sentiment is becoming more visible every day.

新型冠狀病毒（COVID-19）因其具有迅速傳播的能力與人傳人的傳染性，已成為全球性問題，從而引發全世界失序。幾乎全球所有國家都未預料到COVID-19對本國經濟及公民的日常生活帶來的殘酷影響。西班牙是第一波受到COVID-19嚴重影響的歐洲國家之一，也是首先實施安全措施（如全國檢疫和單獨隔離）的國家之一。在全國封鎖時期之後，西班牙政府開始進行四個階段的全國疫情降級行動，但顯然與該國主要報紙發表觀點意見與社論，亦即支持和反對政府在疫情降級期間相關政策之有效性相衝突。透過對西班牙兩家重要的報紙（El País和El Mundo）使用的標籤及其語義、語用含義進行基於語料庫的言談分析，本研究旨在調查報紙之論述實踐，以及不同的政治意識形態如何影響其使用的標籤，反之亦然。語料庫數據是由400篇文章內含362,383個憑證所組成，收集於2020年5月，對應西班牙政府宣布疫情降級的前15天。研究者針對新聞報導進行了基於語料庫的調查，包括對詞彙的選擇和分類，以及在新型冠狀病毒流行期間的報導重點。本文以社會認知方法（Van Dijk, 2008）作為理論框架，研究結果顯示，兩家報紙都特別關注西班牙首都馬德里所面臨的政治分歧問題：關於中央政府可靠程度令人質疑，以及中央政府在應對疫情二次爆發的準備程度。此外，研究還發現El País傾向於制肘西班牙政府的行動，而El Mundo則更直接地報導了其反對降級措施的立場。這種使用的標籤、評論和傳遞資訊的方式，在西班牙讓民眾間產生了恐懼感，也失去了對政府的信賴感，因此民眾進一步拒絕了政府為預防、控制和應對疫情而採取的政策及努力。這些事件導致社會和政治分裂，威脅到西班牙公民的團結，強烈的負面情緒隨著一天天過去越發明顯。

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