Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2026
Publication Title
Journalism
Keywords
news, immigration, coverage, Latin America, text-as-data
Abstract
This study examines the news media’s coverage of intraregional immigration issues in three Latin American countries –Colombia, Chile, and Mexico– from 2014 to 2018, when immigration became a salient political issue in these nations. We examine the news coverage by utilizing a novel sample of approximately 20,000 news articles and relying on a Structure Topic Modelling (STM) analysis to detect the most prevalent topics in the news. Our findings reveal that policy issues and stories related to human rights constitute the primary focus of news media coverage on immigration in those countries. We also investigate whether there are differences in the coverage between legacy and non-traditional news outlets. The results show differences among traditional and non-traditional/digital-native media regarding immigrant stories, and across the three countries analyzed, different patterns of news coverage emerged. These findings advance our understanding of immigration reporting in developing democracies and shed light on the role of media in Latin America.
Funding Source
The work of Sebastián Rivera was supported by Iniciativa Milenio (ANID) - Núcleo Milenio para el Estudio de la Política, Opinión Pública y Medios en Chile (MEPOP) (Grant NCS2024_007). This article was published Open Access thanks to a transformative agreement between Milner Library and Sage Journals.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
DOI
10.1177/14648849261442243
Recommended Citation
Severino, F., & Rivera, S. (2026). Does it matter who tells the story? Newspaper coverage of immigration across three Latin American countries. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849261442243
Comments
First published in Journalism (2026): https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849261442243