Online Media Coverage of Environmental Protest in Chile: Challenging the Protest Paradigm?

Chile is an environmentally stressed country that needs to implement effective public policies to address the climate crisis. The growing severity of ecological challenges underscores the need to understand how the media portray environmental conflicts and protests, and how such coverage may raise awareness and drive societal and policy responses. This research approaches the Chilean context by analyzing the online media coverage of socio-environmental protests over twelve years (2010–2022). A corpus of 1,251 news articles was analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, to identify key themes in the reporting of environmental conflicts and to assess whether the visibility of protests correlated with improvements in Chile’s environmental policy performance. The findings reveal that the visibility of socio-environmental protests in the media coverage negatively correlates with Chile’s EPI rankings. Furthermore, the topic analysis suggests that Chilean online news coverage focuses on political and economic themes, diverging from the traditional protest paradigm in its portrayal. However, elements of social society invisibilization persist within this coverage.