Storytelling and Journalism: Narratology of Two Social Movements in the French and Spanish Presses

Journalistic texts covering foreign social movements often adapt information to readers who are unfamiliar with the context. In this study, we compare and analyze a cross-border representation of an external social movement and how the main Spanish and French newspapers characterize two of the most significant social movements in each other’s countries over the past decade: the yellow vests movement in France and the indignados movement in Spain. Our aim is to explore how neighboring countries perceive and present these events and how their reporting may shape readers’ understanding of the movements. To achieve this, we employ storytelling approaches (Salmon, 2007; Marti & Pélissier, 2012; Pélissier & Eyrès, 2014) in a qualitative study and use the ATLAS.ti textual analysis program to perform semantic labeling of relevant lexical units. We analyze the narrative propositions (Adam, 1997; Heidmann & Adam, 2010; Adam, 2018)—linguistic segments that provide semantic insight into the story—to study the conceptual frameworks activated in the reader’s mind. These segments are labeled with a semantic typology that enables us to generalize underlying semantic frameworks. We believe that our methodological approach ensures objectivity in our analysis.