Abstract

The objective of the present study is to highlight the importance of online newspapers in the formation of public opinion, by discovering whether they promote positive or negative attitudes towards immigration or contribute to increasing awareness about the impact of the digital press in educational and developmental terms. With this in mind, we carried out a comparative study of the digital versions of the two widest selling, broad-based daily newspapers in Spain: el mundo.es and el pais.com. We used the same methodology as that used in Comparative Education, analyzing the content of articles published between January 2009 and June 2010. Although there are many similarities between the two newspapers and both coincide in supporting the process of integrating immigrants into Spanish society, they differ in the strategies to be followed for achieving the sought-after goal of peaceful coexistence between migrants and the host community. «El Mundo» tends to favour adopting strategies that encourage immigrants to adapt to the established norms and guidelines of the host society; in the articles of «El País», on the other hand, the requirement for them to adapt is not regarded as necessary. However, the various ideological lines expressed in the articles that we analyzed enable us to draw the conclusion that they do not coincide to a significant degree with the editorial line of the newspaper publishing them.