Abstract

Political talk shows -called “tertulias” (media gatherings) in Spain- are a dialogical opinion genre without a clear codification. Their wide-ranging presence and large audiences in the Spanish media system are the reason for the central role of this type of programming in radio and television. These political media gatherings allow for a flexible political discourse process. However, the selection of “opinion-makers” shows a “false” internal plurality that facilitates the spectacularization of political content through the political personification and dramatization of personal anecdotes which heighten the emotional register. In this article two daily regional TV political talk shows -one public (Televisió de Catalunya, TV3) and one private (8TV)- and one public local broadcaster (Barcelona Televisió, BTV) are analyzed to detect elements of spectacularization from the campaigns of Barcelona’s local elections (2015).

Abstract

Public television has a mission to promote debate around topics of public interest. Twitter is the social metamedia used by TV programs to fulfil this task online. This research analyzes the capability of public television to generate an effective debate through Twitter and also looks at the relationship between physical audience and social audience. We apply a quantitative methodology that employs our own capture and treatment technique to examine the activity generated by the hashtags proposed by six television programs on BBC One, TV3, and La 1. The main finding shows that these programs fail in their mission to generate a robust public debate in Twitter; instead the discussion is generated by a recurrent group of users that control the debate flow around their comments. Finally, the physical audience is not a predictive factor of the social audience.