The Announcement of Cessation of ETA's Activity in the Spanish Newspapers: Analysis of the Covers from the Theory of Framing

ETA announced on October 20th 2011, in a statement, the "definitive cessation of its armed activity". The next day this news was the main cover story of almost all Spanish newspapers, displacing other scope issues as the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The treatment of the ETA statement was very different depending on the analyzed newspapers. Some media chose merely descriptive titles, others went further and interpreted what the statement said or, from their point of view, what lacked in it. This article analyzes the covers of 55 newspapers from the Theory of Framing. To conduct the study, we started from the Diagnostic frame, setting six different categories: Expiration, Denouement, Inadequacy, Consequence, Testifying and Condition. This research shows the validity of this methodology to reveal discourse strategies that media use to build different frames from the same reality.