Building Spanish and Catalan identity in the debate on banning bullfighting

Catalonia’s ban on bullfighting, which was passed by the Parliament in July 2010, caused a political and media commotion. This study analyses the arguments provided by the Spanish press with the aim of verifying how the media is involved in the conflict, accentuating the distance between advocates and abolitionists of the bullfighting tradition. The research compared editorials and opinion articles in Catalan and Spanish leading newspapers, taking a discursive approach. The authors defend that the comment columns did not add new perspectives to stories compared with the opinions offered by the editorials of the newspapers and that these displayed the bullfighting debate as a pretext for reaffirming their position with regard to identity. After conducting a discursive analysis, the authors state that the media is understood to be a political player whose actions influence the evolution of the conflict. This can be done by means of the (de)legitimization of both, the discursively implied participants and their actions. The discursive approach will be followed in order to uncover how ideological beliefs are spread and how the selected newspapers help to construct identity.