Abstract

Press plays a major role in the construction of public opinion. In 2018, Chilean national public debate was centered on the breakthrough of the feminist movement, with occupation of universities and massive marches as landmarks of the movement throughout the year. Four national newspapers —El Mercurio, Las Últimas Noticias, La Tercera and La Cuarta— are the leading newspapers in Chile. In this context, we pose the following question: ¿How did the leading Chilean newspapers participate in the public debate on the 2018 feminist movement? Therefore, our aim was to characterize the opinion flow around the 2018 feminist movement in three opinion genres of the afore mentioned newspapers. For that purpose, we studied, from a semiodiscursive perspective, three aspects that compose the opinion flow: points of view, voices, and debate issues. The corpus consisted of all publications on the topic that were published in the four newspapers around the two landmark events of the 2018 feminist movement: the march of the 16thof May —the first to draw media attention that year—; and the march of July the 25th, that marks the decline of the media coverage of the movement. We, thus, compiled a corpus of 86 texts belonging to three opinion genres. Results showed differences in the opinion flow of the four newspapers, especially between serious papers and tabloids, which helps us understand key aspects of the influence the media aim at exercising.