Summary: | The power of news media to shape public opinion has been widely researched and acknowledged. In the globalized world of today, media representations of different ethnic groups therefore contribute to social segregation or desegregation. This thesis investigates how Spanish news media frame Spain’s most numerous minority of non-European ethnicity: the Moroccans. Using a quantitative content analysis, we have analysed about 200 news articles in the two most read Spanish online newspapers, El País and El Mundo, published during a two-year period, 2010-2012. Our results show that the newspapers produce a negative image of the Moroccan minority, mainly by associating Moroccans with crime and violence, which, to a certain extent, also applies to other minority groups in Spain. This conclusion shows that today, prominent European newspapers mediate a discriminative image of Moroccans and other ethnic minorities, although more through a subtle negative associative pattern than through the use of depreciatory terms or words.
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