Keywords: News, media, journalism and public opinion

The journalistic treatment of political news is a necessary object of study in contexts of transitional democracies (Mellado and Van Dalen, 2017), like those of many Latin American countries that have left behind dictatorial governments recently. Its relevance is based on the impact of the discourse of information companies in the socio-political sphere (Carpentier, 2007) and in the capacity attributed to the media of influencing the social values that are prioritized, in the beliefs, attitudes and aspirations of a community (Shoemaker and Vos, 2009).
In Chile, where this study was conducted, the reference newspapers, including their digital versions, continue to be the most frequented spaces for accessing political and governmental news (Godoy and Gronemeyer, 2012) thereby revealing their great competence to adapt to fast social, political and technological changes (González, 2005).
For that reason this research analyzed the trends in the treatment of political information in the two Chilean quality newspapers of national scope, El Mercurio and La Tercera, during the country´s transition towards a consolidated democracy. An intensive qualitative content analysis was carried out comparing a sample of relevant political news published by both media in constructed weeks of the years 2007, 2011 and 2015. Methodologically the work used framing analysis tools and the definitions of generic frames (Semetko and Valkenburg, 2000). The aim was to establish which are the frames usually chosen to inform about these events, and to observe the significant similarities and differences between the two newspapers that shape public opinion in this country. Thereby this study was also testing the presumption that in the Chilean press there is a tendency to homogeneously focus on political and government matters, which would weaken the contribution of journalism to a broad public debate and delegitimize its social role in spheres of great citizen impact.
This work is preceded by an empirical study that replicated in Chile the research conducted by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) using the five generic frames that the authors described as the most recurrent in a broad spectrum of news and in different cultural contexts: conflict, attribution of responsibility, human interest, economic consequences and moral judgment. Although in general terms they were observed in the Chilean press, there were also differences in the distribution of certain indicators and the existence of additional frames was already appreciated preliminarily. All this came to relativize Semetko’s and Valkenburg’s expectations (2000) on the universality of their frames and to support the thesis that journalistic framing is also conditioned by cultural contexts and that the study of news frames requires local perspectives (Aruguete, 2010).
This investigation makes that contribution by supplying original and relevant data on the coverage of Chilean politics based on the establishment of the local frames that would characterize Chilean political journalism and locally complement Semetko’s and Valkenburg’s (2000) five frames mentioned above and based on the analyses of national trends in the use of frames in a transitional period that included changes in government coalitions.