Mellado and Scherman (2020) studied diversity of sources in the Chilean media. They compared the outlet, that is to say the distribution platform, as well as the medium, understood as the brand, considering that the majority owns more than one platform. Outlets emerged more influential than the medium when it came to diversity of sources, with television the most diverse. This can be understood as its being the one that incorporated more citizen voices.
In the same study, radio was highlighted for being the outlet including more political sources. Online news stood out for including more sources coming from other outlets, without being a considerable contributor to diversity – an outcome of their economic structure and publication rhythms. Newspapers included the most non-political official sources.
However, Mellado and Scherman propose that the selection of sources can be better explained by the medium than by their outlets, considering the editorial culture and work structure of each organisation. The visibility of some sources is influenced by the political and economic stance of the medium and how they evaluated their news balance.
On average, most articles published by printed media in Chile contained two sources, usually an interview and a press release (Del Valle-Rojas et al., 2016). In this regard, the interviewed editors said they could use just the press release in the article, but they usually processed it.
Díaz and Mellado (2017) concluded that the sources with biggest presence in the news were official and governmental ones – a warning about Chilean journalists’ dependency on them. The Barometer for Information Access of the National Press Association (ANP, for the initials in Spanish) shows that the five sources to which journalists resort to the most are municipalities, regional governments, Carabineros de Chile [national police], investigations police, and the Ministry or Regional Secretaries for Health (ANP, 2019).
The media houses interviewed for this research all subscribed to at least one news agency, without this being an input that defines their editorial identity. As declared by the editors, neither was it relevant when deciding what is published, except for one case that gave special emphasis to economic journalism and where, as a result, information from Bloomberg was key to the development of their content.
From the interviews, it was also understood that even if they sought balance in news coverage, it was only to search for objectivity, which is often reduced to political party representation, implying that both the government and opposition parties were represented in an article or as interviewees throughout the week. However, there was barely any search for sources that intended to reflect other types of existing diversity or those that emphasised the representation of minorities. “It allows us to move very little, we are boring. We go to the sure thing: who gives us the news”, in the words of one interviewee. Other editors and journalists expressed a similar idea. This is symptomatic of a daily journalism punctuated by routines and urgency, rather than planning a strategic agenda.
There are instances of investigative and long-form journalism – but they are exceptions. These journalists have freedom to research, but only few media houses could afford themselves the time and resources to delve deep into this form with their own teams, as well as to sustain them (see Indicators C7 – The watchdog and the news media’s mission statement and C9 – Watchdog function and financial resources).
