Flickr/Michael K Donnelly. Some rights reserved.
“There are guilty parties, there are solutions” was the motto of the general strike that took place in Spain in November 2012, protesting against the austerity policies of the conservative government. For many citizens, the guilty parties were easy to identify: financial powers, banks, big corporations and politicians. Fewer people referred to the Spanish media as one of the responsible parties for the crisis. But Spanish mainstream media have produced a dominant discourse on economics and the crisis that is intimately linked to the positions and interests of the guilty parties named by citizens.
The press has played a key role in the adoption of austerity policies. Instead of acting as an open space for discussion and debate, media have been megaphones for established powers supporting austerity measures and politics. Media have stolen the citizens’ right to debate public issues.
