Press coverage of sexual abuse in the MeToo era: the Polanski, Weinstein and P. Domingo case

Abstract

This article analyses news coverage of the sexual abuse of women between 2015 and 2020, in the context of the emergence of the MeToo movement, which began in 2017 in the United States. The sample is made up of two Spanish generalist newspapers, El País and El Mundo, and how they have reported on the cases of producer Harvey Weinstein, film director Roman Polanski and singer Plácido Domingo. A qualitative analysis was carried out on 1,625 articles, with journalistic categories of the protagonism of the victim and the perpetrator, description of the character and his actions, sources alluded to, recourse to expert voices, and whether or not the laws against sexual abuse are referenced. The three examples chosen can show as there has been a shift in the last three years of media treatment of sexual abuse in socalled MeToo era, in the direction of empowerment of the victim and loss of credibility of the abuser. The Weinstein case is more remarkable and has clearly put the issue of sexual abuse on the global agenda. Polanski’s showed an increase in the number of news stories about the abuse 43 years after it happened, and a doubling in the number of mentions of Plácido Domingo from one year to the next. Qualitatively, even the hard news emphasise the seriousness of the events and most opinion pieces speak negatively, in many cases placing them in a context of feminist struggle on a global scale. Nevertheless, the deification of the abuser artist is still detected.