Spanish Monarchy under examination: from consensual media silence to attack and defense frames in the case of the scandal of the emeritus king Juan Carlos I

Abstract

Introduction: media use different interpretive frames when covering political scandals. This paper studies two of them -attack and defense frame. These ones clearly reflect the political positioning of the media and their attitude towards cases of political corruption. Methodology: this work carries out a quantitative content analysis of the coverage given by the traditional and digital Spanish press to the corruption scandals linked to the figure of the Spanish King Emeritus, Juan Carlos I. The complete theoretical framework pointed out by Robert Entman, which was empirically developed by Jurgen Maier et al., is followed for its analysis. Results: the main results show that the Spanish press generally framed the scandal associated with the King Emeritus, Juan Carlos I, especially presenting the facts from the attack approach, although significant differences were found depending on the headline analyzed. Discussion: the analyzed data corroborate other international research on political scandals, although the Spanish press seems to offer fragmented approaches more often than the German press studied by Maier et al. Conclusions: we finally found out that in the case of the alleged scandal concerning Juan Carlos I the Spanish media, more traditional than digital press, does offer an interpretive bias and is polarized.