Discursive legitimation of criminalization and victimization of sub-Saharan immigrants in Spanish El País and ABC newspapers

Resumen

This chapter analyses some visual characteristics used to criminalize and victimize sub-Saharan immigrants in a sample from the Spanish press. It contributes to the debate on the discursive construction of "the other", in this case, the sub-Saharan immigrant, in the quality Spanish press. The corpus consists of all the news items published on sub-Saharan immigrants in the digital editions of the two most popular Spanish newspapers, El País and ABC, from 1 January 2012 to 1 January 2015. Visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006) and the model proposed by van Leeuwen (1996, 2008) for the analysis of the representation of social actors is used to deconstruct the main visual strategies used by the Spanish press to criminalize and victimize immigrants in order to reinforce the us-them dichotomy and to legitimize the representation of sub-Saharan immigrants as "the others". The main findings of the study show how immigrants are represented as criminals and victims, which does not favour their integration but contributes to the highlighting of racist attitudes and discrimination.