The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2016
Official Conference Proceedings

The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2016
Official Conference Proceedings

The European Conference on Media, Communication & Film 2016
Official Conference Proceedings

The study analyses whether, in the context of Chile’s concentrated media ownership,
the press shows trends towards 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 media themselves regarding the framing of
their quotes, will permit to establish the tendency towards a homogeneous or diverse
behavior of six reference papers studied, especially the two leading newspapers, El
Mercurio and La Tercera. The research is based on the perception of unfairness with
their 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 limit the diversity of approaches and perspectives
on important social events presented to the public. Our earlier studies with editorials
detected that Chilean newspapers tend to be very similar when judging responsible
parties, always balancing acceptance and rejection and always less critical of the
government than of civil actors. Methodologically, the study also allows to test if the
generic frames proposed by Semetko & Valkenburg (2000), which are already
validated in other countries and cultural contexts, serve the purpose of empirically
analysing Chilean media. Like numerous international studies on framing, the analysis
of the data shows that when dealing with political news in Chile, journalists mainly
use the frames of attribution of responsibility and conflict. However, the use of the
generic frames analysed here is surprisingly low in the Chilean press as a whole.

Maria-Elena Gronemeyer