The influence of printed and online diaries in the attitudes of their readers towards the 2010 and 2012 Spanish general strikes

Abstract

We pretend to find out if printed and digital media-particularly, El País and El Mundo newspapers and their counterparts on the Internet, Elpais.com and Elmundo.es-are able to modify their readers’ attitudes towards the calls for a general strike. We focused our research on the last three general strikes performed in the country-september 29th 2010, march 29th 2012 and november 14th 2012-. Our approach involves political communication-given that the unions comply with the characteristics of a single-issue movement-, social psychology-with the theory of reasoned action as our main orientation-and emotional communication-assuming Scherer’s propositions. Thanks to the hypertextuality and interactivity of the 2.0 Web, readers are able to answer to the information published by online media, therefore influencing at the same time the attitudes of other readers. We organized focus groups to identify the readers’ discourses, at the same time that we interviewed experts in laboral topics-journalists, academics and politicians. The results differ from one newspaper to the other, but show how the power of written press over their readers’ attitudes is very limited and can not compare to the potential of online media. Trade unions would do better if they focused on other channels or in their own ones.