Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2023

The use of social media, especially Twitter, has become part of the political communication strategies of parties and candidates. Reaching young voters and reducing their historical abstention has become a challenge, even more for candidates standing for the European Parliament, elections that have traditionally witnessed a much smaller turnout. To find out if the main six candidates in the 2019 European Parliament election campaign (10–26 May), called to occupy the presidency of the European Commission, connected with younger voters, this research applies the multiple-case study based on the analysis of their Twitter posts. The results show that candidates (Spitzenkandidaten) preferred to talk about tops such as territory, vote appeal, and their parties’ alliances above the topics that most interest young people: climate change and environment, education, poverty and inequalities, unemployment, human rights and democracy and health. Better political social media communication is needed to make candidates’ communication strategies more consistent and to promote voters’ participation, especially among youth.

This research offers a critical perspective on the news coverage by the European Parliament’s virtual press room (VPR) of the refugee issue during the European migrant crisis, from 2015 to 2017. Recent social media research has focused on systematizing a theoretical approach to VPRs, but there is a remarkable lack of critical approaches that link news production to the institutional ideologies operating in the news industry. A content analysis is conducted on the characteristics and tone of news articles published by the VPR, followed by a comparison with the European Union’s regulatory framework and actual response to the issue. The research reveals a positive treatment in news coverage of the refugee issue, which suggests an imbalance between the European Union’s institutional news policy on refugees and the weak and fractured response of European organizations when taking action on the issue.

This article examines how Cuba was represented as a travel destination in four mainstream media in Spain between 2010 and 2019. The study combined a thematic analysis with a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to focus on their supplements and travel sections. The results revealed that Cuban representations were far from the common discourse attached to ‘sun and beach’ tourism for Caribbean travel destinations. Instead of this, aspects related to society, citizenship and daily life of Cuban people were the most common. Cultural and natural heritage were also salient topics. The CDA revealed about a discourse with some persistence of stereotypes and dominant metaphorical areas that framed Cuba as a ‘paradisiacal’ destination and emphasize the ‘hot’ nature of the island. The study illustrates that the actors in these narratives – tourists and Cuban people – had a variety of roles and agencies. The research contributes to the existing research on Cuban representations and media discourse with evidence about the weight of social issues, culture, heritage, but also remaining postcolonial views to the island, grounded on discourses of otherness and exoticism.

This article analyses the main concerns and attitudes Basque adolescents have with regard to youth identity and social media usage. For that purpose, three techniques were combined to collect data in seventeen schools in the Basque provinces of Gipuzkoa and Labourd: a survey of 1133 students, of whom 242 also completed a diary and 482 took part in discussion groups. The participants mentioned several reasons to post content, including a tendency to want to present a positive image of themselves. It can be concluded that the attitudes of Basque adolescents resemble those found in recent studies from western countries, indicating the same predisposition to externally oriented identities.

Public broadcasting media are facing the need to reconnect with the younger audience, who are moving away from traditional TV consumption in favour of over-the-top (OTT) content. In the case of public media, this is happening in a context that involves the need for revalidation and the necessity to face the worldwide services challenge imposed by the strong specialization of OTTs. In Spain, political instrumentalization and financial problems are adding pressure to the chronically fragile media. This article addresses the strategies of public broadcasters in reconnecting with younger audiences. It focuses on the online offering of Playz directed at the youth market. Using a case analysis research strategy, the results show the absence of a clear strategy for Playz. The findings also indicate the lack of a clear definition of public service goals, although the content is consistent with Public Service Media (PSM) expectations.