Introduction
The media system has always been one of the basic elements of a social structure, being the creator of the social reality. Media organizations are the central element in the process of symbolic mediation between the facts and the members of a society, and they have an important role in the socialisation process of people, informing them and creating public opinion.
This paper aims to explore the need of an ethnic community to feel represented by a media system, looking at this as a vehicle of cultural maintenance and promotion. We will demonstrate the importance of having ‘national’ media through the observation of the Catalan and the Basque coverage of the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004, realising that both territories were sometimes focusing on different kinds of information to the Spanish one, as a way of keeping the ‘nation’ united. For that, we will observe the editions between March 11 and March 14 of 2004 of Avui and Gara, two nationalistic Catalan and Basque newspapers.
To facilitate the understanding of the issue we will also provide a theoretical framework for the study of nations without states through the example of Catalonia and the Basque Country, two ‘sub-state nations’ (Guibernau, 2000:1004) inside Spain.
Nations without states; the Catalan and the Basque case
The respeced catalan professor from the Open University in the UK, Montserrat Guibernau, explains the concept ‘nation without state’ refering to “nations which … maintain a separate sense of a national identity generally based upon a common culture, history, attachment to a particular territory and the explicit wish to rule themselves” (2000:989).
Another important concept is ‘self-determination’. Nations demanding it often want to achieve the right to decide for themselves, and in some cases even seeking independence. Quebec, Scotland, Flanders, Catalonia and the Basque Country are a few nations without states that are currently demanding more autonomy and the right to decide for themselves what they want to be.
Focusing on the Spanish case, the main objective of the political decentralisation is to solve one of the major and eternal conflicts: between central (Spanish) and peripheral nationalisms (Catalan, Basque and Galician ) (Solé Tura, 1987; Pérez-Díaz, 1993; García Ferrando et al., 1994). “While the former seeks to consolidate and strengthen the state, the latter challenges its legitimacy and often, but not always, seeks to construct a new state” (Guibernau, 2000:990).
In the case of Catalonia and the Basque Country, the goal of ‘national reconstruction’ is openly declared. This means promoting daily use of Catalan and Basque languages, as well as national identification and self-governing (Martínez-Herrera, 2002:429). For instance, in Catalonia, Catalan is currently the most spoken language both in the public and private scope .
Media system as a vehicle of cultural promotion and identity
The sub-state nationalism in Spain (Guibernau, 2000) and the plurilingual journalism gives us a good reason to study the mass media’s role in the construction of national identity.
“The term identity involves four components: differentiation, continuity, awareness and recognition. Without differentiation there can be no distinction between any of them; without continuity, we cannot talk about the same person over time; self-awareness allows us to have a critical awareness and specific vision of the world around us; and the external recognition of difference comes in answer to the need to be accepted by others.” (Port Ribalta, 2008:39).
Language is the vehicle between the reality and the members of a nation, and it is part of the wealth of human experience accumulated in the course of history. But culture is not just language, although in the case of Catalonia it is the vehicle of cultural production and one of the most important features of its cultural and national personality.
Nowadays, more than always because of the current global era, the media system is the major tool of cultural promotion and identity, and its main role is the normalization of the national tongue. “Media … affect the way individuals within societies construct meaningful ways of social belongings” (Hopkins, 2009:20). Being companies, all the media organizations have a target group, an audience to work for. They produce the contents always thinking about that audience, and in the case of ‘national’ media they work for the citizens of that nation or ethnic community.
The relationship between information and nationhood has long been handled for different communication researchers (eg., Billig, 1995; Brookes, 1999; Law, 2001). For instance, Geertz (1973) argued that structures of social interaction require a cultural representation that makes them intelligible, so giving sense to behaviour. The media system is certainly that vehicle of representation, witnessing some events and putting them closer by the social reality of the members of the community.
Anderson (1983) introduced the conception of the ‘imagined community’ saying that “nations are social constructs existing in the minds of their members and that newspapers play central role in creating and sustaining an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers” (1983:62). The ‘Banal Nationalism’ of Billing (1995) goes beyond this idea emphasizing the media’s role in advancing an ideological creation of the nation in western societies where nationalism has become embedded and naturalized. Moreover, he argues that the press reinforces nationhood through routine rhetoric, but this will be discussed later.
11M coverage and the ‘exceptional case’ theory
The terrorist attacks in Madrid in March 11 of 2004 are a good example of ‘exceptional case’, a theory suggested by Giorgio Grossi in 1985 after the kidnapping and subsequent assassination of the Italian politician Aldo Moro. He explained the role played by the media in situations of big conflict and social disruption.
The 11M affected all the social routines because of its magnitude, severity and degree of breakdown inside the Spanish and international society. The institutional and political legitimacy, the social control and the common identity were questioned by the citizens and by the media. The Public Opinion was witnessing a looting of the social system and the democracy and this fact caused a terrible influence on the society’s vision of the stability of the country. Regarding events like this, the media system switched on the alarm light to activate exceptional routines in order to create an exceptional coverage for an exceptional case.
All the media adopted new ways to transmit information and had to use an incredible amount of staff in order to cover the events and inform the citizens that needed, more than ever, information. The television programming was altered with special news connections, the newspapers published a special evening edition giving the details of the attacks, the radios stopped the normal programming to add news bulletins every 10 minutes and the internet media services were uploading new information every minute. The whole country was shocked, and the media were saturated.
But in these situations the effort of the media goes beyond the information task, because as creators of opinion and vehicles of social and national unification, they had to stop the chaos and contain the confusion of an agitated society.
If the first task was the tricky and unexpected adoption of new journalistic routines, the second task was the goal of recontextualization of the facts in order to make them comprehensible and compatible with the social schemes. For doing that, they had to take a specific logic based on the adoption of ‘primary facts’ and ‘secondary facts’ (Grossi, 1985a). The first one was the bomb attack in itself: the exact situation of the bombs within the city of Madrid, the meticulous description of the time when the different bombs exploded, the situation of these in each train and the amount of victims and injured people, for instance.
We can state that Catalan, Basque and Spanish media were working at more or less the same level on the coverage of ‘primary facts’. The interesting and different roles of the media of each territory begin with covering the ‘secondary facts’. These were the hypotheses about the authorship of the attack, the evolution of the number of victims, the police’s investigation and the political debate about how to manage the crisis, for instance. All that secondary information, facts that explain other facts (Grossi, 1985a: 50-51), were created on purpose and following the editorial line of each media.
The Catalan and Basque media coverage of 11M and their deixis
Studying the articles published in the Catalan newspaper Avui and the Basque Gara, we noticed that the treatment of those ‘secondary facts’ was quite different from the Spanish press. We can establish two main differences: the content and the national deixis used by those media to refer to Spain, Catalonia and the Basque Country.
To begin with, it was observed that Gara paid special attention to the methodology followed by the terrorist band in the attacks . It pointed out the notorious differences from the explosive materials used usually by ETA, for instance. The newspaper also published some other news reviewing the agreement achieved by the international community on claiming that ETA was not the author of the attacks, while blaming Alqaeda. Gara selected the information according to its nationalistic editorial line in order to invoke the Basque public opinion to think about an innocent ETA.
No less interesting is the Catalan coverage of the events. Despite the declarations of the Catalan president encouraging citizens to “feel Madridians for one day,” Avui decided to publish this opinionated article: “We are the pain, we are the solidarity, we are the blood needed to be given, but we are not Madridians … We are a decent country, with common sense. Today we Catalans should define our personal humanity and our collective dignity, avoiding being taken by the typical Spanish strident noise” (fragment of Salvador Sostres’ opinion article, 14/03/2004). This shows perfectly the editorial line taken by the newspaper three days after the attacks.
In addition, Avui pointed out the relation between 11M and the ETA’s attack of Hipercor in 1987, establishing a sentiment of empathy with Spanish people and trying to promote an exceptional peaceful environment between both nations. Furthermore, the newspaper paid special attention to Catalan organizations that condemned the attacks, such as union associations, universities and the Trade Confederation of Catalonia, for instance.
The second main aspect that needs to be handled when talking about the national coverage of 11M is the deixis that both Catalan and Basque media used. Riggins (1997:8) suggests that inclusive and exclusive pronouns are “most revealing of the boundaries separating Self and Other”. Indeed, the difference between Catalan/Basque and Spanish people is always present in the national press. There is a standardized use of ‘we’ and ‘they’ in the daily production of Catalan and Basque news in order to establish a distinction between members and non-members of the nation. For instance, we can observe that both Gara and Avui used expressions like ‘Spanish government’, ‘Spanish state’, ‘Spanish capital’, ‘Spanish geography’ and ‘Spanish president’ every time they want to refer to these concepts. In addition, and particularly on the coverage of 11M, both newspapers were using the third person while reviewing the facts, suggesting that the attacks were overseas, outside their boundaries. We cannot but highlight expressions used in some articles written on Avui’s opinion section such as “who will protect us from Aznar’s Spain?,” “we are against those countries that participate in this unfair war, and in particular against the UK, Spain, Australia (…),” or, published in Gara: “the participation of his army on Iraq’s invasion put the Spanish state in the islamic terrorism’s spotlight”.
Conclusions
The daily use in national media of expressions such as ‘we’ and ‘here’ in oppostition to ‘they’ and ‘there’ gives us indisputable evidence about the role they are playing within a community.
The media system is both the creator and the guardian of national identity. We have studied the case of Avui and Gara, two examples of national newspapers with nationalistic editorial line. They take Catalan and Basque nations and their citizens as the landmark and as the centre of their discourse by using the personal pronoun ‘we’ and by focusing on those news events that are of exclusive national interest. The readers (or the audience in broadcast media) unconsciously pick up the ‘national’ references hidden behind those ‘small crucial words’ (Petersoo, 2007:424) and become part of a nationalised system, consuming information in their own language, about their own national matters and building an own opinion about the reality. The sentiment of national belonging is automatically inherent in the media discourse, being this at the end one of the most important vehicles of cultural transmission.
The Catalan and the Basque nations are openly demanding more autonomy and self-administration, and this can be observed in every day national and state news. Bilinguism is the biggest threat to both territories, manifesting itself in the international and Spanish immigration in Catalonia and in the decresing daily use of Euskera in the Basque contry. This is why the media work in these languages and why citizens want to keep consuming them. Although language is not the only component of culture, we can assert that it is at least one of the most important as a definite symbol of identity.
As we have observed, the media are the reference point of a community and are responsable for taking care of it. Actually, this is the perfect symbiosis, because media organisations need to focus on a target group, and citizens need knowledge to build an own opinion of the social reality, and at the same time somebody reminding them why they are there.
NOTES
1. We will use the term ‘nation’ as a synonym of ‘ethnic group or community’, taking the premise that Catalonia and the Basque Country are nations.
2. Galicia is considered one of the 4 nations coexisting within Spain. We consider as Spanish nations: Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician.
3. A Catalan Bill of Linguistic Normalisation was promulgated in 1983, and a second in 1998.
4. We understand ‘national’ media as those media working within a national territory, not state territory.
5. This is the shorthand taken by the media around the world for the bomb attacks in Madrid on March 11 of 2004
6. ETA has a particular methodology. We can assert that ETA always notifies some minutes before attacking and always uses the same explosives. In the case of 11M, the explosives found on the scene were different, and there was no warning.
7. It was on June 19th 1987 in a Shopping Centre located in the middle of Barcelona. 21 people died and 40 were injured.
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