The Role of Journalism on the Progress of the Sustainable Development Goals and 2030 Agenda: The Case of Spanish Digital Media (2015-2022)

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Alberto E. Lopez-Carrion  

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda are an action plan promoted by the United Nations (UN) with the aim of improving the lives of people and the planet itself by 2030. Since its promulgation in 2015, different agents have carried out communication campaigns with the aim of disseminating it to society, although different studies and surveys ensure that the knowledge of the world’s population is still very low compared to the transformative nature of this plan. This research focuses on the treatment of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda by the main digital media in Spain. The methodology is based on a quantitative analysis of the number of appearances that have been recorded since the promulgation of this global action plan, and also employs a set of linguistic and statistical tools for content analysis, discourse analysis and text mining in order to establish the different associations with the informative topics with which the media link the action plan that was approved in 2015 by the consensus of the 193 UN member states. The main results show that, since the year of its promulgation, the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda are increasingly cited in the news but, nevertheless, this issue has been losing prominence, as less and less informative content is published that details in depth the transformative nature of this action plan, being cited in an incidental manner in most cases.