Abstract

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propose the establishment of a global agenda, the implementation of which involves shared responsibility among various political, economic, and social actors. Among these actors, the media play a prominent role due to their key role in the symbolic construction of the transformation suggested by the United Nations (UN) and their pivotal role in the public interaction of other actors involved in it. The media bear a social responsibility to deconstruct imaginaries, contextualize and democratize discourses, challenge macroeconomics and hegemonic power agents, advocate for realistic changes in lifestyle and thought models, and thus go beyond what is known as 'development communication'. In this study, we present a correlational diagnosis of the journalistic treatment of the SDGs by the main media outlets in the 19 Spanish-speaking countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, and Venezuela. To create the dataset, we selected all publications made over the past year by approximately 1700 media outlets on their respective pages on two of the most widely used digital social networks in Ibero-America: Facebook and Instagram. This study offers a twofold contribution. From a thematic perspective, it provides a broad overview of information and communication management related to the SDGs in a context marked by profound differences but united by a common language and culture. From a methodological standpoint, it presents a quantitative modeling strategy based on cluster analysis, which may be of interest to other projects seeking to identify general patterns in the formation of public opinion based on large amounts of data.