¿Reproduciendo la lógica mediática?un estudio empírico sobre el impacto del debate electoral español en nuevos y viejos medios

Laburpena

The present article intends to elucidate the effect that the Spanish electoral debate produced on the public sphere, conceived as the combination of traditional media and the new emerging digital public sphere (blogs, social networks). Our purpose is to analyze the debate`s impressions of different actors, such as journalists, political committed bloggers and ordinary citizens, on both traditional and digital communicative platforms. We propose a variety of methodological approaches to be applied to our sample. First, content analysis will establish how the media and the blogs covered the debate with the help of the following variables: main topics, main characters, and authors` personal opinions. Second, a quantitative-qualitative analysis will allow us to evaluate the structure of the blogs in order to analyze the underlying communication model (elitist or participatory). Finally, the citizen online discussion emerging on the blogosphere will be analyzed according to a deliberative conception of democratic communication observing indicators such as reciprocity, discursive diversity, argumentation and coherence. By analyzing two days of the campaign (the same day of the debate and the following day), we seek to assess the similarities and discrepancies of the debate`s coverage and its political interpretation on three different levels of communication: a) the traditional public sphere, b) the digital public sphere, and c) the citizen`s online political interaction.