On 4 May 2018, fifty years after their first attack, ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna, in English: Basque Country and Freedom) announced its dissolution. All the Spanish press reported the announcement, but the editorial line in each paper has different nuances that Dr Ricardo Maria Jiménez analysed in his latest study entitled “ Framing the end of ETA terrorism in the editorials of four Spanish newspapers.”

In his study, Jiménez, lecturer of Law and Humanities at UIC Barcelona, explores the ideological basis and the argumentative strategies deployed in four Spanish newspapers, namely El Mundo, El País, La Vanguardia and El Periódico, on that day: 4 May 2018. “Four prominent headlines were chosen from the Spanish press, often reflecting different ideological positions. In this way it is possible to analyse whether there are different positions on the end of ETA. This topic was selected because, for six decades of Spanish history it was a fact and an attitude of paramount importance,” explains the philologist and lecturer in his study.

As a result of this analysis, the prominent role of the “story” is visible in the El Mundo and El País; the role of the victims in all the journalistic texts studied; and even a different position with regard to the ETA prisoners. “While El Mundo and El País seek to disarm ETA’s lies, seeking to preserve the memory of the truth of what happened, the editorial of La Vanguardia legitimised the claims of the terrorist group in a veiled way. In the text of El Periódico, criticism of the terrorists’ narrative of wanting to give a voice to all players is blurred,” says the expert.

Jiménez based his study on a hybrid method of discursive and argumentative analysis of the four editorials, which is the result of the combination of principles of narrative analysis and text linguistics, as well as framing.

This research was carried out within the framework of the research project “El demos en el imaginario de la nueva política: el debate sobre la voluntad popular en el discurso público en Europa” (FFI2015- 65252-R), (Demos in the imaginary of new politics: the debate on the popular will in public discourse in Europe), financed by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) of the Government of Spain, and of the research group GradUN.