El «caso Lavapiés»el discurso racista en comentarios de usuarios en la prensa digital

Abstract

Racism continues to be a relevant issue in the media of developed countries, especially in the current moment of exacerbation of social fear against immigration. Cyberspace does not escape this phenomenon in genres as readers comments of digital press (Daniels 2009). In the framework of digital humanities and using critical analysis of discourse as a tool, we explore how racism perpetuates in the comments made by readers of digital press through global semantic strategies of positive self-presentation and negative presentation of others and their specific strategic moves (van Dijk 1984, 1987, 1991, among others), as well as employing conceptual metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 2004) organized within metaphor scenarios (Musolff 2011, 2015, 2016). These categories, together with aspects of stylistic variation, are analysed in numerous examples from a corpus compiled between March 16 and 18, 2018, after the riots that occurred in the Lavapiés neighbourhood (Madrid). Research shows that global strategies, strategic and rhetorical moves, networks of conceptual metaphors as well as variation both in lexis and deictics are deployed in numerous interventions to construct typical racist topoi of difference and threat associated with ethnic minorities, justifying therefore discrimination and inequality. This study aims to raise awareness of both the daily discursive practices which favour the dissemination of xenophobic messages in cyberspace and the challenge that those practices may entail for online journalism.