The post-truth phenomenon in coverage of the gender-based violence issue in Spain’s pandemic media space (on the material of ABC)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of post–truth in the modern media space, particularly in Spain. For the first time, the neologism “post-truth” was recorded in the explanatory dictionaries of the Spanish language in 2017. It was nominated for the “word of the year”. Interest in studying this phenomenon is growing every year as post-truth has become an integral part of the modern media space around the world. The phenomenon is widely studied in modern science. The research material for the article is the daily social and political newspaper ABC, which is considered one of the leading publications related to quality press in Spain. The author examines the phenomenon of post-truth on the material of newspaper publications devoted to the problem of violence against women during the state of emergency in Spain (from March 14 to June 21) due to COVID-19. The analysis of the published material in the newspaper (more than 250 articles) showed that journalists are actively using linguistic techniques of manipulative influence on the reader — exaggeration of facts or their distortion/ inaccuracy, use of affective vocabulary, vivid and memorable phraseological units, epithets, comparisons, reference to unreliable sources and appeal to civil liability. All these linguistic methods contribute to the formation of a distorted picture of the actual situation in Spanish society regarding gender-based violence. The author revealed that the statistics in the newspaper do not correspond to the official data. All this testifies to the phenomenon of post–truth in the modern media space in Spain. The findings confirm that modern journalism plays on people’s emotions and feelings to attract the reader.