La relación de la visibilidad mediática de las comunidades autónomas con la conciencia regional y otros indicadores sociales. Análisis comparativo de la repercusión mediática de las regiones españolas y estudio temático de la cobertura periodística de castila y león en la prensa nacional

Resum

This thesis looks at the media coverage of Spain's Autonomous Regions in the printed and digital press. The case study narrows the timeframe to 2010 and includes a content and interpretative analysis of almost 10,000 news items with an aim to determine the nature of the representation of Spain's regions in the press, and more specifically of Castile and Leon. The results show that there are huge gaps in quantitative representation between the few regions that account for the majority of salience (Madrid and Catalonia, mainly, but also the Basque Country, Valencia and Andalusia) and a larger group of other regions vying for media attention. The data also reveal Castile and Leon as the first of the less important regions. On a second level, the collected data on media coverage of Spain's regions were compared to data from the CIS (the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research) and the INE (the Spanish Institute for National Statistics) on different social indicators. Once we had conclued from the case study that the media systematically prioritised regions, the challenge was to test whether there were specific factors that could be related to the degree of prominence of a specific region. In order to do so, we tested correlations between media salience and regional awareness (the data were collected from CIS's 2nd Spanish Autonomomic Barometer), population, region size, wealth, productivity and editorial activity. The results show that the wealthier and more populated, productive and editorially active the region, the higher its exposure in the media. Finally, the nature of the topics associated to the regions was tested through a model of recurrent topics applied to Castile and Leon. Contrary to what was expected, topics of a positive kind prevailed.