A FORGE OF CONSENSUS

The Spanish transition to democracy constituted an exceptional journalistic period which started with the death of the dictator Franco in 1975 and finished in 1978, the year in which a new democratic Constitution, currently in force, was approved by referendum. During those years, the Spanish political system changed radically from a dictatorship to a full democracy similar to the democracies enjoyed by Western European countries. This article proves the hypothesis that the majority of newspapers supported the main guidelines of political reform and the strategy of consensus led firstly by the francoist reformist elite and by the opposition political parties afterwards. The research method is a content analysis focused on the introduction of democratic values in newspaper editorials and applied to twelve newspaper titles which covered the ideological spectrum within the Spanish journalistic scene. This piece of research could be likewise considered as a contribution to the particular histories of the analysed dailies during those critical years.