Press, politics and public charity: the discursive foundations of the Spanish Law of 1822

This article analyses the journalistic treatment of charity in the Madrid press during 1821, in the context of the Liberal Triennium. The main objective is to identify critical discourses on the functioning of the welfare system and the care of the poor, focusing both on the problems of financing and on the structural, institutional and human deficiencies that affected the charitable centres, with special attention to the foundling homes. The research is based on a newspaper corpus centred on publications such as El Censor and El Universal, using a methodology that combines discourse analysis with a contextualised reading of the sources in order to reconstruct the logics of representation and denunciation present in the public debate. The results point to a landscape dominated by precariousness, neglect and inefficiency, where reformist initiatives clashed with scarce resources, administrative fragmentation and the persistence of clientelistic practices. The criticisms reported in the press reveal not only an emerging social sensitivity, but also the lack of articulation of a welfare model in line with the principles of the new constitutional regime, making welfare a reflection of the tensions of incipient liberalism.