Does Chilean Media Coverage of the 2024 Wildfires Address Audience Concerns?

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Constanza Ortega Gunckel, whose interest is in the coverage of the Chilean wildfires in 2024. Chile regularly experiences such fires in February, but the 2024 fires were exceptional in their extent and death toll; this also increased Chileans’ need for information.

Social media – and especially also Instagram – were especially critical here, and Instagram users also posed questions towards the media to better understand what was going on here. The present project examined such news coverage and user comment in Instagram from the perspective of a dramatic curve in the coverage of these events. It focussed on the 14 accounts of the most trusted Chilean news media over the course of the crisis.

Media focussed mostly on the description of the situation during the early days; later coverage moved to the support and reconstruction efforts and other aspects. Users mostly asked about what was happening, and what was being done to address the fires – asking for example about the use of firefighting planes, and later on also about accountability and preventative measures. This did not stop throughout the month of February.

Media coverage does not necessarily align with user demands in this, especially after the initial phase of the coverage of the immediate fire event itself. In the aftermath of the fires, the media coverage does not respond to users’ questions, and this may be due to the lack of alignment between these longer-term issues and the typical short-term dramatic curve of media coverage. This might point to opportunities to improve the media coverage of such events and their consequences, and enable the media to play a more supportive role in society.