ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that the discourse of the mass media in the Spanish-speaking world is a field of recent interest. The earliest studies date from the 1980s and 1990s, but since the beginning of the 21st century we have seen a veritable explosion of publications on the subject. There are various reasons for this. First and foremost, the study of discourse in its own right is a recent enterprise in the Western world. Despite the important contributions of pioneers such as Mikhail Bakhtin (largely unknown in the West before his death in 1975), Michel Foucault, and linguists who dared to look beyond sentence grammar, such as Roman Jakobson, Zellig Harris, James Loriot, Kenneth Pike, and Robert Longacre in the United States (US), Michael Halliday in Australia, and Émile Benvéniste in France, discourse analysis (DA) as a collective enterprise does not start before the 1970s. DA, almost inevitably, is a confluence of differing interests, disciplines, and theoretical standpoints, a truly international enterprise in which no one single linguistic tradition can be more important than another. Its growth sprang from a desire for a broader scope for linguistic study, and richer, more socially relevant perspectives on language(s). Media discourse soon became part of that broad scope, but achieved prominence with the revolution of new electronic and digital technologies and media from the 1990s on. If the press, rather than the more recent media of radio and television, has been the focus of many media discourse studies, it is because the classical technology of typeface has moved from the printed page to the computer screen.
