Belligerent rhetoric in the journalistic treatment of educational conflicts: war metaphors regarding the subject Education for Citizenship

Abstract

The news coverage of education should place special emphasis on accuracy and correctness since it is a matter that directly affects children. This demand acquires even greater importance in the case of educational conflicts. The media should act in such cases as mediating agents favouring the search for agreements and solutions. In recent years, a type of journalism more closely aimed to increase social tension than to foster people’s knowledge of reality has been practised in Spain, for example with respect to the controversy on the start-up of the Education for Citizenship subject. Using textual analysis of numerous news items published in the dailies ABC and La Razón, this paper investigates whether the rhetoric used in the discourse of the conservative press favoured the representation of the educational conflict as a warlike situation by recurrent use of metaphors from the semantic field of war. By doing so, these newspapers’ messages would have favoured a conceptualisation of the conflict that intensified it, affecting the normal course of school life and students’ academic development.

KEYWORDS: educational journalism, press, conflict, metaphors, military discourse, Education for Citizenship subject.