Trends in Reference Newspapers in Chile: The Art of Balancing Positions Through the Framing of Political News Sources

Abstract

The study analyzes whether the press, in the context of Chile’s concentrated media ownership, shows trends to a uniform framing of viewpoints in news about the actions of the government, political parties or civil society. A content analysis isolating positions of the sources and the own media regarding the framing of their quotes will permit to establish the tendency towards a homogeneous or diverse behavior by six reference papers studied, especially in the two leading newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera. The research is based on the persistent perception of unfairness with the audiences because the Chilean press is considered dramatically homogeneous and subject to monopolistic practices, which would reduce the social actors represented in it and consequently would limit the diversity of approaches and perspectives on important social events provided to the public. Our earlier studies with editorials detected that Chilean newspapers tend to be very similar when judging the responsible, always balancing acceptance and rejection and always less critical of the government that of the civil actors. Methodologically, the study also allows to test if the generic frames proposed by Semetko & Valkenburg (2000), already validated in other countries and cultural contexts, serve the purpose of empirically analyzing Chilean media. Preliminary analyses detected, like numerous international studies on framing, that in political news in Chile journalists mainly use the frames of attribution of responsibility and conflict. While there are others, such as the frame of human interest, which appears rarely and morality, that almost never is used.

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Author Information
Maria-Elena Gronemeyer, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
William Porath, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile

• Category: ECS4 2016, EuroMedia2016, Oral Presentation, Paper Available
• Tag: Journalism,

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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