The construction of a sensationalist discourse in the 20th-century Spanish sports press

Abstract

This paper analyzes the construction of a sensationalist discourse in the 20th-century Spanish sports press in two decisive periods (from 1895 to 1936 and the Political Transition, from 1975 to 1982), when a spectacle-oriented strategy of sports information developed and became eventually established. During the first third of the 20th century, the sports press adopted spectacularity strategies based on a combination of dramatic and sensationalist photography, critically humoristic drawings, connotative headlines, and descriptive and emotional articles which could also include realistic fiction. During the Political Transition period, sports journalism resumed the path of the Second Spanish Republic and tried out new formulas that came to establish a popular-sensationalist model in which exaggerated emotivity, the fascination of images, and narrative aggressiveness mark the guidelines. Spectacle-sport would come to flourish above all in the so-called mass sports and especially football.