News coverage of euthanasia in Portugal and United Kingdom: A comparative study of public issues and argument structures between 2016 and 2024

Abstract

As artefacts of mediation, economic activity, and social organisation, newspapers provide individuals with ways of experiencing the lives of others and seeing themselves represented (Deuze, 2014). It is up to journalistic publics to decide how intensely and in what ways they connect to the (hyper)mediation of the shared world (Pasquali et al., 2022). In the new social reality of public death in the media (Sumiala, 2022), the hegemonic values associated with suffering and the politics of mercy are summoned to public negotiations. The desire for a change in the law to allow access to euthanasia has seen growing public acceptance. Polls carried out in Portugal (Coutinho, 2023) and the UK (Booth, 2023) revealed that 72.5% and 65% of citizens, respectively, are in favour of legalising euthanasia. The Portuguese context is particularly relevant in this regard, given the ongoing process of regulating euthanasia. In 2023, the euthanasia law was passed by confirmation to circumvent the fifth veto by the President of the Portuguese Republic (Lusa and SIC Notícias, 2023). The United Kingdom is still debating the decriminalisation of euthanasia (Booth, 2023). Although previous studies have examined the issue of euthanasia in the news media, there are currently gaps in the literature that we have attempted to fill with this study. There is no specific focus on the Portuguese context and therefore no comparison with the British scenario, despite both countries having a history of public debate about euthanasia in the media. Furthermore, the existing studies on the British media are mostly from before 2011 and do not consider the evolution of public discussion over the last decade. The aims of this study were to identify the similarities and differences that characterise the news coverage of euthanasia between 2016 and 2024 in Portugal and the United Kingdom; to analyse how newspapers frame the political, legal, religious, and medical dimensions of the public debate; and to compare the argumentative structures of these nations. To apply a longitudinal comparative statistical analysis, our sample includes journalistic texts published in the digital media of the newspapers Público, Expresso, The Guardian, and The Telegraph. Quantitative content analysis (Krippendorff, 2019/1980) and argumentative discourse analysis (Hajer, 2006) are combined to obtain the observable patterns of the representations of euthanasia in the texts and to examine the associated argumentative structure. The variables in this study are as follows: (a) date; (b) country; (c) media; (d) author; (e) journalistic genre; (f) length; (g) theme; (h) geographical scope; (i) number of voices; (j) occupation of voices; (k) role played; (l) position adopted in relation to euthanasia; (m) arguments mobilised in favour of euthanasia; (n) arguments mobilised against euthanasia; (o) degree of manifestation of the argument; (p) origin of the argument; (q) level of the argument; (r) scale of evaluation in relation to the argument; (s) who evaluated the argument; (t) specific terminology used; (u) decoding and explanation of the terms; (v) presence of context or background information on the topic. This communication presents the results of this ongoing study.