Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Generally speaking, audio-visual consumption is changing. More specifically, in recent years young people have increased their viewing of content through the Internet, which is often supplied through online platforms. This article focuses on one the Playz platform, which is one of the key strategies being used by Spanish public television (RTVE), as it aims to reconnect with the new generations through transmedia narratives. Based on studies undertaken by Costa Sánchez (2013) and Cascajosa-Virino (2018), a content analysis of the series broadcast on Playz between 2017 and 2020 has been carried out, taking into account the duration, year of release, and number of episodes or seasons for each of them. This study confirms a clear interest by this platform in generating products that are innovative from their very conception. In fact, a large number of transmedia strategies have been identified, such as episodes turned into films, a high degree of interactivity with the audience, original music videos, promotional events and more, which is in line with Playz’s public service obligation to reach out to all types of audiences through all the platforms available to them.

The present age is called the age of communication. Undoubtedly, in all matters of the world, the most incredible information is on the shoulders of the mass media. Today, the media have influenced the identity of contemporary man by expanding geographical, cultural and political boundaries so that the identity of modern man can be called media identity. The increasing role of new means of mass communication in various parts of human life has led to multiple fields. One area that social media have influenced in the present age is political participation. The present paper sought to test the effect of social media on the Iranian citizens’ willingness to electoral participation political actions using the World Values Survey (WVS) wave 7 data release (49 countries/territories). The results show that social media indirectly, through the mediator variable of political trust, reduces the willingness of individuals to participate in elections. Moreover, the results show that social media, both directly and indirectly, increases citizens’ willingness to engage in political protests.

This article explains how the technical and artistic means used in the production of air combat cinema have a direct impact on the historical rigor of these films. Through the analysis of 180 productions of this subgenre, a study has been made of these techniques and their evolution over time, as well as the impact they have had on the historical rigor of the films in which they have been used. Obtaining, as a result, a global vision of the suitability of the technical and artistic solutions that this type of cinema has used to represent History in audiovisual format.

Combining computational methods with qualitative analyses, this research explores how the European Union (EU) employed digital diplomacy to manage its reputation during the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, it addresses two influential dimensions of digital diplomacy: narratives and social networks. First, to identify how narratives evolved during the different phases of the crisis, dynamic topic modeling is applied to a sample of 12,935 tweets in English published by eight central EU authorities from January 1st, 2020, to March 11th, 2021. The most representative tweets of the six most predominant topics on COVID-19 are analyzed through the strategic narratives’ framework. Second, a social network analysis of the retweets of 215 authorities linked to the European External Action Service is conducted to identify the communication flow and the most influential actors. The results corroborate what the crisis communication literature anticipates. As the pandemic evolved, strategic crisis narratives became more consistent, and the diplomatic network less hierarchical and centralized. After an undetermined start, the COVID-19 crisis was ultimately rationalized as a challenge that reaffirmed the EU’s functionality and values. During the acute phase of the crisis, diplomats were less spontaneous, since their content was more dependent on their superiors, but in later stages they produced proportionally more original content themselves. Therefore, the findings suggest, first, that the EU’s performance on Twitter became more competent over time, and second, a potential correlation between narratives and networks: better defined strategic narratives seem to indicate a more genuine digital diplomacy.

The main objective of this study is to give greater visibility to the female immigrant journalists who pioneered Portuguese newspapers within the United States. It also contributes to the restoration of their collective memories, lending special attention to some socially significant moments of symbolic value, so as to understand their remarkable roles within the Portuguese-American press. Their stories reveal the efforts of these women who strove to make a career in the world of journalism, and their determination and dignity, despite their socio-cultural origins from immigrant communities with rural roots, mostly in the Azores Islands. The male-dominated society of both the Portuguese diaspora and the USA meant that the inherent discrimination of cultural and social stereotyping relegated female roles to positions of inferiority and submission. Expected to forego higher education, they were often pushed into low-skilled jobs, even while caring for children and working as housewives. Through a qualitative methodology, based on the scarce few available archival resources, the lives of women who worked as editors of the Portuguese press in the United States are set in an historical perspective. Finally, the most representative aspects are presented of two of the most singular and paradigmatic pioneers of Portuguese journalism in the United States, Laurinda C. Andrade and Mary Nunes Silveira, respectively, the editors of A Tribuna Portuguesa (New Jersey) and the Jornal Português (California), through a discussion of their biographies and their professional careers.

Public diplomacy, despite its numerous and varied definitions, is essentially a communications process. By engaging the academic literature of public diplomacy with Lasswell’s model of communication and Braddock’s rearticulation of his model, this paper proposes an integrated framework that allows for the systematization of public diplomacy research. The framework is composed of the independent variable of context, which influences a set of dependent variables: the actors, publics, messages, objectives and tools of public diplomacy. Accordingly, this paper argues that public diplomacy research has been traditionally approached from an agent-centric perspective, and despite its obvious significance, the influence of context has been understudied. In order to test the utility of the model, the paper applies it to the case study of the European Union’s public diplomacy during two different settings. First, it will expose the main characteristics of the EU’s public diplomacy during times of globalization, where the EU’s public diplomacy was characterized by its normativity. Subsequently, the current context of deglobalization and de-europeanization will be introduced and analyzed through the following research question: what happens to the EU’s public diplomacy when the founding myth upon which it is constructed is under threat? By altering the context, one can easily see an emerging but clear transformation of the characteristics of the EU’s public diplomacy. By analyzing official, policy, and legal documents, and engaging with the academic literature on the topic, the paper concludes that the main objective of the EU’s public diplomacy in a changing world should be to provide for ontological security through (emotional) strategic metanarratives.

This research carries out an analysis of the websites published by MENA countries’ embassies with a presence in Spain, in order to understand whether they practice digital diplomacy. Such activity is a low-cost, wide-ranging public diplomacy tool. The analysis covers a two-year period (2020-2022) that coincides with the Covid-19 pandemic, a context that prompted the digitization of many sectors. The article contributes to the literature on Arab and Israeli digital diplomacy, as well as on digital diplomacy as practiced by embassies. Specifically, this exploratory analysis examines the webpages and published press notes of four countries’ embassies, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, Morocco, and Qatar. These countries were chosen because they have the most robust websites in Spanish, together with the fact that they were the MENA countries whose governments pioneered the use of Twitter as an instrument of digital diplomacy. The article examines the topics and interpretations provided by the press notes published on these embassies’ websites. A discourse analysis methodology with references to the original sources is applied. Topics and interpretations are classified into four types of public diplomacy: media diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, niche diplomacy and nation branding. The conclusion is that the MENA countries studied neglect digital diplomacy on their websites in Spain, missing out on the opportunities it represents. The apparently four most digitized embassies in this group have errors on their webpages and often only publish messages from their respective foreign ministries, focusing on regional and internal issues rather than on their bilateral relationship with Spain. This is especially true of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The promotion of Hungary and Viktor Orbán among American conservatives is often presented as a warning of conservative embrace of illiberal politics. While acknowledging the draw of Hungary’s illiberal policies as the motivating factor for American conservative interest in Hungary, our focus seeks to answer to what extent this embrace of Hungary can be considered a form of public diplomacy. We examined the frequency and substance of mentions of Hungary and Viktor Orbán in 1643 articles within 13 American conservative media outlets to track how the narrative around the country and the prime minister has evolved over the past four years, bearing in mind the impact of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Viktor Orbán in late 2021. We found both an increase in the quantity of articles focused on Hungary and Viktor Orbán as well as a largely positive trend defending and praising the policies of Hungary and the prime minister. We also observed a strong focus on Orbán as the primary actor of Hungarian public diplomacy and argue that this hyper-presidentialized focus exemplifies the deinstitutionalization of public diplomacy, along with other elements that contribute to the enhancement of Orbán as an individual public diplomacy actor.

Defence diplomacy and public diplomacy are two diplomatic practices often treated in the literature as two disconnected realms. While the former focuses on the peaceful and cooperative use of armed forces, the latter emphasizes on the advancement of strategic communication in the international policy of actors. However, it is possible to bridge the differences between the two using the concept of soft power. By doing so, defence public diplomacy can be understood as a set of practices developed by states seeking to influence and attract third states while employing military force within these parameters. This paper contributes firstly to the conceptual debate bridging both types of diplomacies. Secondly, it selects a case study, Spain, to examine the perceptions of three different Spanish elites involved in the formulation and implementation of defence public policy: politicians, the military and defence industry managers. This paper adopts a qualitative methodology, including in-depth interviews, focus groups with experts, and manual content analysis of primary documentary sources. The results show that these elites agree on the importance of defence diplomacy for the achievement of state goals but continue to understand it fundamentally from a classical diplomatic prism. They also discuss the inclusion of new concepts, such as deterrence, as part of a defence public diplomacy.

This article aims to build a better understanding of today’s communicative changes of public diplomacy in the post-truth era. Today, our communication environment has changed compared to decades ago: about 5 billion people communicate online and compete among themselves through their social media narratives, which are the main platform for the distribution of fake news in the post-truth era. The question posed here is: what are the winning narratives in the complex global environment of public diplomacy? Through problematizing review, this article analyses the sources of soft power which were described at the end of the Cold War, and which remain effective even in today’s communication environment. Also, the purpose and influence of public diplomacy has been problematized, analysing how to influence foreign government by influencing its citizens. The paper concludes that the values of soft power described three decades ago only have limited and specific effects on non-European publics, but not on European ones. Additionally, it is impossible to influence European governments by influencing their publics through public diplomacy because the context has changed and the values of soft power in these countries no longer have the former distinctive gap between them.