Does it matter who tells the story? Newspaper coverage of immigration across three Latin American countries

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.