The watchdog role is not predominant in Chilean political journalism, where roles of interventionism, infotainment, and civics are more dominant (Hellmueller & Mellado, 2016). In legacy media, in general, there are teams with specialised journalists who have dedicated a large part of their careers to this type of work. Some editors continue to sustain these teams as serving essential aspects of their editorial work as well as their mission within the medium. For teams who work in daily coverage and do not develop long-term investigative journalism, both journalists and editors said they see tools to develop this type of role through interviews and journalistic questioning. In other cases, this may be through analysis and opinion pieces. In any case, the informative function is privileged to that of overseeing.
The perceptions of journalists and the audience, however, differed. The 2020 Digital News Report presented that 66 per cent of Chilean journalists agreed that the media “monitor and scrutinize the powerful”, while only 36 per cent of the audience agreed with that very sentence (Kalogeropoulos & Fletcher, 2019). “My topics are very informative, there are no serious accusations”, said one journalist who covers the government. An editor commented that their main function is overseeing power, but as they do not have an investigative unit, when they have information that is critical of conflicts of interest, it is often published with less development. This is done with a view to impact the agenda of other media houses that will potentially follow the story through.
Although the ecosystem of digital media is wide and varied, recent research shows that in this medium, at least moderately, there is a greater manifestation of the watchdog role than in legacy media (Elórtegui Gómez & Mellado Ruiz, 2019; Mellado et al., 2018). This can be explained by projects that are born or developed in an environment linked to investigation journalism. While Ciper Chile is one example that stands out, there are also other independent projects, new fact-checking initiatives born after the 2019 protests (Núñez-Mussa, 2019), and university media publishing work of students putting investigation techniques taught in their classes into practice.
