The political orientation of the newspaper and its influence on the presence of frames and issues within the news

Abstract

The empirical research in which the role of the political orientation of the newspapers is systematically examined is scarce. The objective of this article is to explore the significance of this variable by comparing the framing and salience of the issue of the Merida Initiative in three Mexican newspapers with different political orientation. To this end, we inductively identified the frames in the reports using a cluster analysis. After that, we compared the salience of the issue, the presence of frame elements and the presence of frames in the three newspapers. Significant differences were found in topics, issue-specific frames and value judgments, all of these attributable to the role of political orientation. Nevertheless, there were similarities in the number of reports devoted to the issue and in the actors mentioned.