Analysis of the Informational Treatment of Immigration in the Chilean Press

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the treatment that the Chilean press carried out on the phenomenon of immigration during a year of broadcasts on the social network Twitter (between August 23rd, 2016 and August 23rd, 2017). This phenomenon experienced an explosive growth in recent years in the country, changing the Chilean social landscape with the presence of Peruvian, Colombian, Ecuadorian and finally Venezuelan and Haitian communities. This is a mixed study that uses data mining elements, to extract and refine data from social networks, and content analysis to classify the corpus of tweets emanating from the 290 Chilean media that we follow. Specifically, the following were analyzed: a) which media spoke the most about the issue, b) the qualification of the news, differentiating national from regional media, c) the voices of both individuals and institutions that spoke the most about the issue, and d) the most mentioned immigrants by the communities. Among the results, the relevance that the press gave to political actors, who were the most mentioned, and the relationship between the largest immigrant communities and the appearances in the news stand out. For example, Haitians were the most mentioned foreign group, despite being the fourth largest foreign community in Chile, at the time of the study. While Venezuelans, who occupied the first place, in migratory volume, were the fourth group most mentioned by the press.