Journalism Studies Commons^™

Hablando Del Autismo: Autism Coverage In South America, Silvia Luengo

Honors Program Theses

Based on media framing theory, this exploratory and comparative investigation quantitatively analyzes autism coverage in the top two newspapers from Venezuela and Argentina between the years of 2010 and 2017 in their native language, Spanish. The results indicate there are significant differences between the countries’ coverage of autism in their description of issues, discourse types, sources, images, roles and stigmatizing cues. These differences notwithstanding, science and public relations are the main top two issues reported in both countries. Additionally, a scientific discourse type is more common in Venezuelan articles than in Argentina which focuses on human-interest stories. Individuals with autism …