Gallardo-Agudo, Angel , Garcia-Borrego, Manuel , BECERRA ALONSO, DAVID
No
Rev. Lat. Comun. Soc.
Article
Científica
1
1
01/01/2027
001842547000001
Introduction: Access to housing is one of the main concerns of Spanish citizens. In this context, the present study aims to describe how the housing issue has been represented in Spain's mainstream press between 2007 and 2025, while also comparing and classifying the coverage of leading newspapers. Methodology: To achieve this objective, a content analysis was conducted on 21,618 articles from 13 Spanish newspapers, applying topic modeling (BERTopic) and sentiment analysis (twitter-XLM-roBERTa), which enabled a hierarchical clustering of these outlets. Results and discussion: The findings confirm a clear predominance of economic issues until 2020, when political and social themes -previously marginal- began to emerge on the agenda, introducing new ways of framing housing. Moreover, except for explicitly progressive outlets (eldiario.es, P & uacute;blico, and El HuffPost), which tend to prioritize social issues such as the housing crisis and protests, most newspapers exhibit predominantly economic coverage. Conclusions: This study is the first within the field of communication sciences to apply these computational techniques to the analysis of media coverage of housing, while also handling such a large corpus in the context of the Spanish press. The results show that only when the housing problem reached such a magnitude that it became unavoidable did the Spanish mainstream media system begin to problematize the phenomenon.
agenda-setting; sentiment analysis; Spain; journalism; topic modeling; media coverage; housing