The Diplomat
Football was again the main reference of Spain for the world press in 2022, above news related to the war in Ukraine, the NATO Summit in Madrid, the problems for the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary or the energy policy in Europe, according to a new study by the Elcano Royal Institute.
The Working Paper, made public past week, analyzes the weight of information about Spain in the world press, printed or digital, and the thematic content of that information. During 2022, according to this study, 331,511 articles were published in the world press with clear mentions of Spain and what is Spanish, which places our country in fifth place in Europe in terms of information projection outside its borders, only behind the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy.
According to the study, “football continued to be, for yet another year, the Spanish field with the greatest international diffusion, above news related to the war in Ukraine, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit and those of an energetic nature”. Likewise, and as has happened in the rest of the world, the COVID-19 has moved to a very secondary position in the international information about Spain in the written press, in print and on the Internet.
The report collects all newspaper articles from 200 countries published from January 1 to December 31, 2022. The data was downloaded between April 3 and April 5, 2022 and included all news items that reported on Spain and what is Spanish, with the exception of agenda news, agency forecasts, horoscopes, routine traffic and weather reports, news items that include only headlines and, in general, advertising items or items with little informative content.
Overall, the presence of Spain in the international press, detected in the print or digital media of 200 countries, published in 24 languages, was in 2022 somewhat higher than in 2021 (303,969) and 2020 (299,283), although below those recorded in the years prior to the pandemic. Looking back ten years, the weight of news about Spain in the world press as a whole continues to grow.
Although Spanish continues to be the language in which most news about Spain is published abroad (25% of all non-football related news), due to the interest in our country in Latin America, German has practically caught up with Spanish in 2022 (24%), surpassing English (19%). This data confirms the conclusions of previous reports on the growing interest of the German media in Spain. The languages of our neighbors, French and Portuguese, occupy a meager 8% and 7% respectively, although it should be noted that this figure includes the press published in French and Portuguese in Africa and Brazil. Mentions of Spain in media published in Arabic and in Asian or African languages are very scarce.
The main topics
Once again, football, and everything related to it, is the main source of news about Spain, with more than a third of the total number of mentions (35%), to the point that Real Madrid is the third institution linked to Spain in the international press, only behind NATO (due to the Madrid Summit in June 2022) and the EU, while UEFA and FIFA are also among the top five. This weight of football in the overall news about Spain is much higher than the equivalent in other European countries.
Overall, sport (excluding football) and culture form the block with the greatest numerical weight in the news published about Spain (29%), something to which the victories of Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz have contributed significantly, as well as the successes of Rosalía or the film Alcarrás.
The main political or economic news about Spain outside our country were the celebration of the NATO Summit in Madrid (more than 1,600 news items in June alone) in the context of the war in Ukraine, the tensions provoked in Spain around the organs of the Judiciary (almost 293 news items, especially between October and December) and, at the end of the year, the application of the so-called “Iberian exception” in relation to gas prices and the debates around the energy interconnection with France” (more than 3,600 news items on the energy issue).
Spanish political life attracted less international attention in 2022 than in other years due to the stability of the Government and the fact that there were only two regional elections (Andalusia and Castile and Leon). Much of this political information was devoted to international relations and the Armed Forces, in the context of the Spanish reaction to the war in Ukraine. Once again, the downward trend in the number of articles linking Spain to some form of corruption was confirmed.
As for Spanish companies, Banco Santander is the most cited company in relation to Spain. However, most of the mentions in the world press of Spanish companies do not indicate their Spanish character or origin in any way. Thus, in the case of Telefónica, the most cited Spanish company in the international press, the mentions not related to Spain are fifteen times the number of citations in which Telefónica is mentioned as a Spanish company or in any way related to Spain. To a lesser extent, this occurs with all the companies most present in the press: the aforementioned Banco Santander, Inditex, Ferrovial, Repsol and Iberdrola. Only in the case of Iberia do the mentions associated with Spain very slightly exceed those not associated with Spain.
Morocco
The annual report includes, for the first time, a section dedicated to the volume and content of information published about Spain in the press of a single country, specifically Morocco. For this purpose, the content of thirteen Moroccan written media published in French, Arabic or English, both in digital and paper format, is analyzed, with a result of 4,115 news items published about Spain and Spanish in 2022. The attention that Spain receives in the Moroccan press published in French is less than that dedicated to France and much higher than that dedicated to any other European country. In the case of the press published in Arabic, Spain is the first country by the number of news published.
Each Moroccan media outlet has published, on average, about six news items per month about Spain, although their distribution throughout the year was not homogeneous. The support disseminated in March 2022 by the Spanish government for the Moroccan Autonomy Plan for Western Sahara and its multiple derivatives (return to Madrid of the Moroccan ambassador, visit of Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to Rabat or the reopening of maritime transport between the two countries) led to the concentration in March and April of 27% of the news about Spain for the whole year.
In June and December there were two more news peaks, the one in June coinciding with the tragedy at the Melilla fence, the Spanish-Algerian diplomatic crisis and the NATO Summit held in Madrid. In December there was another peak due to the match between Spain and Morocco in the World Cup in Qatar, in which the Maghreb team eliminated the Spanish national team, which allowed them to reach the semifinals and achieve their best qualification ever.
