Word of war. The case of Pedro Sánchez’s war narrative in the COVID-19 crisis

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Julen Orbegozo Terradillos
University of the Basque Country
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2959-4397
Marian González Abrisketa
University of the Basque Country
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0041-3326

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has reached most countries in the world. In the field of political communication, it is an unprecedented challenge for world political leaders. The aim of this research is to analyze the war rhetoric of Pedro Sánchez, President of Spain, one of the countries most affected by the pandemic. It takes his official speeches delivered from March 10 to April 22 as a reference. Content analysis is used with a procedure created for this case, under the approach of the Critical Discourse Analysis and combining a quantitative and qualitative perspective. After a thorough bibliographical review on the use of war rhetoric in public discourse, a corpus of lexical units w identified and interpreted in context: 101 lexical units and 359 phrases or metaphors with war or military reminiscences are detected in the 13 discourses of the corpus. The greatest “warlike weight” concentrates on the most serious moments and on the victims and those infected during the crisis. The war is the transmission vehicle used by the President of the Spanish Government to convey, in a simple, visual, and moving way, a government decision.

Keywords
crisis communication, political rhetoric, pandemic, COVID-19, political communication, discourse analysis

Article Details

How to Cite
Orbegozo Terradillos, Julen; and González Abrisketa, Marian. “Word of war. The case of Pedro Sánchez’s war narrative in the COVID-19 crisis”. Digithum, no. 27, pp. 1-11, doi:10.7238/d.v0i27.377481.
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(c) Julen Orbegozo Terradillos, Marian González Abrisketa, 2021


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Author Biographies

Julen Orbegozo Terradillos, University of the Basque Country

Degree in Journalism and Advertising and Public Relations. Professor of Public Communication Management and Interpersonal and Group Communication. Main area of expertise: Political Communication. Lines of research: activism in social networks, communication of politics from a gender perspective and innovations in electoral campaigns. He has published in impact journals works related to issues such as electoral debates, hashtivism, fake news, and new electoral narratives with a gender perspective. His experience as a researcher and teacher is backed by more than ten years of experience in the professional field. He has worked as a journalist in various media and as a communication advisor in the Basque Parliament, participating in numerous electoral campaigns in the Basque and Spanish regions.

Marian González Abrisketa, University of the Basque Country

Ph.D. in Audiovisual Communication and professor at the Department of Audiovisual Communication and Advertising of the University of the Basque Country UPV-EHU. He teaches the subject of Audiovisual Creation Processes, in the degree of Audiovisual Communication, and Theories of Communication. She has published several books and research articles on information in electoral campaigns, audiovisual discourses and semiotic studies, among others. She has also participated in several funded projects on electoral information on television and the construction of candidates, as well as on the media, language and identity. Her current lines of research are discourse analysis, gender studies and political communication.

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