William Porath

Personalization, privatization, and campaign strategies in newspaper coverage of two Chilean presidential elections, 1989-2009

We investigate the evolution of the coverage of political campaigns in Chile, through a content analysis of the issues highlighted in four national newspapers in the 1989 and 2009 campaigns. We seek to determine the increases of two types of personalization and the coverage of the candidates’ strategies. We focus on personalization, understood first as “competences” (the coverage of political-personal characteristics of the candidates) which differ from the “privatization” (highlights the private lives of the candidates). Results show an expected increase in the space allocated to privatization and strategies, but no change in the coverage of the political traits of the candidates.

Who has a say in political news? An analysis of sourcing trends in the Chilean quality press:

Based on journalistic sourcing theory, this article analyses sources used in political news in the Chilean elite press to establish whether there is a tendency to diversify them or a persistent pattern of favouring official and mainstream sources. The Chilean case may serve as a ‘laboratory’ for observing journalistic sourcing within a context of highly concentrated ownership of the quality press, which is attributed with being a right-wing ideological duopoly. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of political news published in constructed weeks from 2007, 2011 and 2015, years in which the left and centre-right government coalitions alternated. Our three objectives were, first, to determine whether the sourcing practices used by these media outlets follow the typical pattern of using mainly official and mainstream sources; second, if there is significant uniformity in sourcing in the elite press due to the concentration of media ownership and considering the right-wing ideological monopoly attribu...

TENDENCIAS DE LA POSICIÓN EDITORIAL EN DIARIOS DE REFERENCIA EN CHILE: EL ARTE DE DOSIFICAR LA CRÍTICA FRENTE A LA ACTUACIÓN DE LOS ACTORES POLÍTICOS

The study analyzes whether the press, in the context of increasingly concentrated ownership, has shown a corresponding trend toward a uniformity of editorial viewpoints when discussing the actions of the government, political parties, or civil society. Prior findings reveal that editorials tend to assume a position by identifying an actor that is responsible for the topic being discussed. This facilitates a content analysis that uses the editorial positions of major media outlets regarding the acceptance or rejection of a specific actor. The results suggest a tendency towards an increasingly homogeneous view by the five media outlets studied, especially in the two leading newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera. Chilean newspapers tend to be very similar when judging those responsible, balancing acceptance and rejection in a way that is generally less critical of the government than it is of civil actors.

Tendencias en diarios de referencia chilenos: los modos de encuadrar las noticias y dichos de las fuentes informativas del ámbito político y gubernamental

The study analyses whether, in the context of Chile’s concentrated media ownership, the press shows trends towards a uniform journalistic framing in news about the actions of the government, political parties or civil society. A content analysis considering the news items plus the isolated contributions of each of the sources regarding the framing of their quotes, permits to establish the tendency of framing politics of six reference papers, especially the two leading newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera . Methodologically, the study also allows to test if the generic frames proposed by Semetko & Valkenburg (2000) serve the purpose of empirically analysing Chilean media. 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