Francisco Seoane Pérez

University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Department of Journalism and Audiovisual Communication

How does a new party manage to move from invisibility to occupying a central position in the public debate? How does it gain the attention of the mainstream media and recognition by the public and the institutions linked to sociopolitical and economic power? This article examines the media strategy followed by the Spanish party Podemos in its first...

Los sitios web de noticias tienen incentivos económicos para difundir desinformación, con el fin de aumentar su tráfico web y, en última instancia, sus ingresos publicitarios. Mientras tanto, la difusión de desinformación tiene consecuencias disruptivas e impactantes. La pandemia de COVID-19 ofrece un ejemplo reciente. Al interrumpir el sentido...

News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation, in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the dissemination of disinformation has disruptive and impactful consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a recent example. By disrupting society’s shared sense of accepted facts, t...

This paper examines the compliance of Spanish crime reporting with the principles of the 2016 EU Directive on presumption of innocence, which aims at preventing the publication of information that might bias the public and the jurors against the suspect. A content analysis applied to a sample of 200 crime news stories published by eleven of the mos...

Este artículo estudia el cumplimiento por parte de la prensa española de los principios de la directiva europea sobre presunción de inocencia de 2016, entre los que se encuentra el velar por que no se publique información que pueda inducir en el público o en los jurados una imagen de culpabilidad sobre un sospechoso. El análisis de contenido de una...

Fact-checking was supposed to settle controversies over verifiable information, closing debates regarding the truthfulness of a given proposition. Instead, fact-checking has been weaponized in a partisan manner, with users trying to make more visible the refutations that are detrimental to rivals and favorable to one’s political side. Drawing from...

High-profile events can trigger expressions of hate speech online, which in turn modifies attitudes and offline behavior towards stigmatized groups. This paper addresses the first path of this process using manual and computational methods to analyze the stream of Twitter messages in Spanish around the boat Aquarius (n = 24,254) before and after th...

This chapter investigates how urban public policy is increasingly adopting a global outlook, and posits the case of climate change mitigation as exemplary of the virtues of cities over nation-states in international politics. Just as financial centers were the roots of economic globalization, global cities are becoming the political innovation unit...

Los investigadores en Comunicación formados en España que trabajan en universidades y centros de investigación extranjeros ofrecen un punto de vista aventajado sobre el acceso a la carrera académica en España y el impacto científico internacional de la producción investigadora española. Conocer las razones de su marcha a otros países revela las vir...

Resumen: Este artículo analiza el contenido de los bulos electorales identificados por los fact-checkers (o verificadores de datos) Maldi-ta y Newtral, utilizando como caso de estudio la campaña de las elecciones generales del 28 de abril de 2019 en España. Para estu-diar el contexto en el que opera la desinforma-ción electoral, se creó un bot en l...

High-profile events can trigger online hate speech, which in turn modify attitudes and offline behavior towards stigmatized groups. This paper addresses the first path of this process by using manual and computational methods to analyze the complete stream of Twitter messages in Spanish referring the boat Aquarius (N = 24,254) From the rejection of...

This article investigates the narratives constructed around the Greek crisis by Spanish elite press, in the period between May 2010, the date of the first international bailout package of Greece, and June 2016, the date of the latest parliamentary elections in Spain, which registered a disappointing result for Podemos’, SYRIZA’s sister party. The v...

Its reliance on social media and television to mobilise supporters and popularise the figure of its charismatic leader, political science lecturer Pablo Iglesias, is one of the main characteristic features of Podemos, a new, left-leaning populist party that has shaken the political establishment of Spain since its irruption as a decisive political...

This chapter reports on the results of a content analysis of campaign posters and videos issued by the political parties competing for the European Parliamentary elections of 2014 in each of the 28 EU member states. We looked at the portrayal of the European project by comparing the Union’s sub-regions (Continental, Northern, Southern, and Eastern...

Los movimientos sociales de natur aleza política han innovado en la política internacional. Los actores no estatales han ocupado el espacio de la diplomacia pública, anteriormente limitada al estado nación. Se analizan las campañas en redes sociales, los actores, los mensajes y las actividades políticas de los movimientos políticos independentista...

Political magazines offer a vantage point for evaluating the present and future of in-depth journalism in the digital age. The death spiral of newsweeklies overshadows the increasing influence of political magazines in the national and global debates. Publications like The Atlantic or The Nation keep on advancing policy solutions and inoculating de...

Los asuntos europeos han dejado de ser meramente técnicos o sectoriales para convertirse, en virtud de la crisis de deuda soberana de 2010, en parte de la vida cotidiana del ciudadano medio. Para informar sobre Europa es necesario conocer antes las características del sistema político de la Unión Europea. No estamos ante un estado nación tradiciona...

Secrecy applies to all deliberate attempts to conceal information from the public glare. In liberal democracies, where the principle of publicity empowers citizens to hold their governments accountable, the legitimacy of secrecy is usually restricted to the areas of national security and foreign affairs. However, secrecy has also a relevant role in...

Introduction. Social movements of a political nature have innovated in the field of international political communication. Non-state actors have occupied the sphere of public diplomacy, previously limited to the nation state. Method. The study is based on the analysis of the social media campaigns, actors, messages, and political activities of Cata...

Political Journalism in Comparative Perspective. By Albæk Erik , Van Dalen Arjen , Jebril Nael , and de Vreese Claes H. . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 264p. $85.00 cloth, $28.99 paper. - Volume 13 Issue 1 - Francisco Seoane Pérez

The national elections held in November 2011 in Spain were a good opportunity to see how the indignados movement made its mark on representative politics. With youth unemployment above 40% at that time, and with the echoes of the occupation of central urban spaces like the Puerta del Sol in Madrid in May that year still resounding, the social wave...

This chapter suggests a novel interpretation of Eurocynicism through the lenses of controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt. Instead of attributing the popular unease with the European Union to a problem of communication (putting the blame on journalistic coverage and on the lack of pedagogical commitment on the part of national elites in expl...

The disconnection between the institutions of the EU and the people of Europe has often been attributed to the existence of a communication gap resulting from the failure of national medias and politicians to convey the importance of the EU. This book challenges that idea instead showing that the fault lies with the idea and institutions of the EU.

European politics moves along two axes. One is ideological, the other territorial. One refers to the traditional left-right divide, the other to the national interests of the member states. A predominance of the ideological cleavage would be an indication of community cohesiveness. Greater salience of national interests, in contrast, would be revea...

The expression “communications gap” is, as noted in the Introduction, a loaded term that implicitly attributes to a mediation problem the distance between EU institutions and their citizens. In order to consider the “communication deficit” as one of the potential explanations and not the only explanation for the lack of popular engagement with EU p...

Among European studies scholars there is a recurring fight between those who see the EU as a sui generis political system, with no paragon in this world, and those who try to explain it by resorting to generalisable theories from the body of international relations. To these latter, the behaviour at European Council meetings could be comparable to...

”Do you think a federation would be the solution for Europe’s economic problems?”, asked the journalist of the princess of an imaginary European country at a crowded press conference. “Any initiative to encourage the cooperation among European countries would be welcome”, replied Her Majesty, with the political correctness and opacity of a European...

Let us consider a fictional scene. At the end of a pan-European presidential election night, the directly elected President of the EU addresses the masses gathered at the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Brussels. Following some suggestions discarded during the negotiations of the European Constitution in the early 2000s, the presidency of the council and...

The twin deficit of domesticisation (lack of identity) and politicisation (lack of agonistic conflict) substitutes in my approach the concept of “communications deficit”. Rather than considering Eurosceptic media and uncooperative national politicians as the source of the lack of popular political engagement with European politics, I move the targe...

The set-up of a European Semester, under which EU Member States’ public budgets and accounts are supervised by the European Council, along with the prospect of a fiscal harmonization across Eurozone Member States that would limit the agency of national governments’ economic policy, has thrown the EU political system into the spotlight of public (an...

Were common issues across the EU during the campaign framed as mainly ‘national’ or mainly ‘European’ by the member states? This chapter overviews the main election topics: economic and monetary affairs (responses to the financial crisis), employment and social protection in Europe (social security systems, European social model), climate change/en...

The outcome of the European Parliament (EP) elections in Spain was so predictable that the results exactly matched public opinion polls in the country’s main national newspapers a week before voting on 7 June 2009. The ruling party, the social democratic Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party — PSOE) with 38.5 per cent...

The goal of this study was to learn about how college students are using the Internet and to compare their use of it to that of college students as reported in 2002 by replicating and extending previous research. A survey of college students at 40 U.S. higher education institutions was conducted, along with observations and interviews at several Mi...

Las elecciones generales españolas de 2008 reprodujeron características ya comunes en las democracias occidentales: campañas permanentes, negativismo y personalización. Los medios de comunicación dominantes desplegaron a lo largo de la campaña una estrategia de polarización bipartidista incentivada por los socialdemócratas y los conservadores, lo q...

The 2008 general elections in Spain reproduced the common characteristics of Western democracies: permanent campaigning, negativism and personalizing. Throughout the entire campaign, mainstream mass media employed a strategy of bi-partisan polarization that was encouraged by both social democrats and conservatives, resulting in a loss of power for...

Available online at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2009.01439.x/asset/j.1083-6101.2009.01439.x.pdf;jsessionid=60EE03A45C8F675DC9233170663A5B10.f03t02?v=1&t=hwy2yh3q&s=bfefc5bc2fa1c2cf4deba17dbc59f216ca28a653 The goal of this study was to learn about whether race and gender make a difference in Internet use among U.S. coll...

The aim of this study is to explore, based on a nationally representative sample, U.S. college students' uses of the Internet in their studies and their perceptions of academic life online, and changes in both perception and use since a 2002 report on the topic. Findings show that overall Internet use for academic purposes has increased. Students r...

A REPORT ON THE 2008 JAY G. BLUMLER ANNUAL LECTURE, celebrated on 9 December 2008 at the Institute of Communications Studies,University of Leeds, with Professor Elihu Katz, of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania as Guest Lecturer.

The Spanish general elections of 2008 held attributes familiar to Western democracies: permanent campaigning, negativism, and personalization. The mainstream media played along the strategy of bipartisan polarization encouraged by the Socialists and the conservatives, which resulted in a loss of power for the smaller nationalist parties and the pos...

This paper offers a review of the role of the Internet in fostering political engagement. The informational environment of those who become active in politics through the Internet is described, underscoring the fact that pote ntial online activists are avid mainstream media consumers. Questioning well-established assumptions in the literature, this...