Shifting sands: Spanish press coverage of Western Sahara before and after Spain's 2022 autonomy pivot
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study compares how three ideologically distinct Spanish newspapers— El País (centre-left), ABC (right-wing) and Público (left-wing, online)—framed the Western Sahara conflict before and after Spain's 18 March 2022 recognition of Morocco's autonomy plan. A two-year content analysis ( N = 221 articles) tracks shifts in frame use, primary sources and tone toward competing sovereignty claims. Across outlets the conflict frame dominated, while economic considerations were marginal; security and humanitarian emphases declined after the policy shift. El País and ABC partially converged, normalizing official narratives despite opposing editorial leanings. Público relied more on NGOs and Sahrawi actors and maintained the most consistently pro-Sahrawi tone. Findings lend support to concerns about elite cueing and overreliance on official narratives in the Spanish press, but show that meaningful disparities remain among newspapers with different ideological orientations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it