News values as evaluation. Main naming practices in Violence Against Women news stories in contemporary Spanish newspapers: El País vs. El Mundo (2005-2010)

Abstract

Violence Against Women (VAW) is a very sensitive, and highly ideological, topic in the Spanish society, as well as in Western societies generally. In Spain, media accounts of VAW are very closely related to two quality newspapers, El País and El Mundo, providing a variety of naming practices for VAW, with differing ideological and evaluative implications. In this paper, I compare and contrast these two dailies in their use of the three main naming practices —violencia de género ‘gender-based violence’, violencia doméstica ‘domestic violence’ and violencia machista ‘male violence’— used in VAW news. To do so I resort to the news values approach proposed by Bednarek and Caple (2012, 2014, 2017), which involves paying attention to the combined insights from both Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis (cf. Baker et al. 2008, Partington et al. 2013).