Communication and violence: The image of the minor in the press photographs of the ETA attacks

Abstract

Introduction: The photographic coverage of the ETA attacks by the press has had various subjects, among which the victims stand out, but there is also room for the murderer, the journalists, the witnesses and the spectators. This research will focus its attention on minors, especially in the representation of their evolution. More specifically, we intend to study the spaces in which they are located, to later establish the frequency with which they are recorded, the prominence they have in the frame and the roles they play. Methodology: These objectives have involved the use of content analysis in its qualitative version. To this end, a sample has been delimited that has included six newspapers – La Gaceta del Norte, Hierro, El Correo, Deia Egin and El País – over a period of 30 years, from 1968 to 1997, the date of the attack by Miguel Ángel Blanco Villar. In this tour, three categories have been established: archive images, those of funerals and those of the place of the attack. Discussion and results: A cyclical model of representation is detected where the minor is omitted at the beginning to gain an unusual prominence from 1976 and later disappear again from the photographs. Conclusions: Depending on the established categories, the performance of different roles is observed, such as identification, the spectator in the image, the child who indicates the place of the event, the witness or the repository of symbols.