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Descripción
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The fall of the Berlin Wall has generated emotions and social passions all over the world, not only in Germany but also in Spain. The entire communist world, and not only the new state of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was at stake. This chapter is concerned with the application of the notion of genre to Spanish newspapers, which dealt with the fall from 1989 onwards. These newspapers combine texts, layout and images to convey meaning of this socially significant activity. We are interested in the analysis on newspaper front pages. Front pages act as “show windows” of their respective newspapers to establish the individuality of its newspaper ((Bateman, John, Delin, Judy, & Henschel, Renate, New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey, 2007): 148). We take the case of two Spanish newspapers of opposing ideologies: El País (leaning towards Europeanism, progressivism and social liberalism) and the newspaper ABC (known for generally supporting conservative political views). In doing this, we pay attention to the following multimodal features: (1) the layout structure: the nature, appearance and position of communicative elements (text, headlines, photos) on the page, the hierarchical relationship, along with the content-related structure of the information communicated about the fall of the Berlin Wall; (2) the rhetorical structure and how the content is strategically argued. We draw on the theory of pragma-dialectics and use its notion of strategic manoeuvring to trace and contrast the rhetorical fabric of the data. The findings of this case study may be of interest to researchers of revolutions and the media, multimodality and rhetorical discourse analysis. (2025)
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