Media Coverage, Polarization and Educational Reforms in Spain

Summary

Education laws involve, for all political parties, one of the most visible flagships of their ideological project. In this regard, different governments have made legislative modifications to introduce orientations in this field closer to their partisan interests. Therefore, following existing models of political communication, in Southern European countries the coverage of this information leads to a potential dichotomized media context. The present research displays an analysis of the Spanish case during the last forty years, to verify the influence that educational reforms have provoked in the press coverage. For that purpose, we have used new machine learning methodologies, complemented by the development of self measures, to capture complex social phenomena within semantic variability scenarios. As a result of those processes, findings have evidenced a clear relationship between the ideo- logical proposal of political parties and the editorial line of the printed press, regarding the mentioned educational reforms that were developed under the period of study.