Public discussion subjects in Chile's 2005 presidential elections: relationships between the agendas of mass media and the mediatized agendas of candidates and government

The purpose of this paper is to show the public discussion topics that dominated the mass media during the last presidential election campaign in Chile in late 2005. It also intends to determine the topics for which the candidates and the government appeared in the media. Agenda-setting's conceptual theory and methodological frame were employed to analyze the inter-relations among the agendas of these three public actors with the aim to describe how the public discussion was articulated. A quantitative content analysis was carried out on the two most influential newspapers and the three most important television newscasts. The results show a difference in television's agenda compared with newspapers'. In fact, the papers' agenda is closer to the topics, which the political actors appear in the media. The results also reveal that President Ricardo Lagos and his speakers appear with different agendas in the media. The candidates share many similarities, but while a discussion is evident between the government's candidate Michelle Bachelet and her three contenders, the latter tend to appear in the media with a homogenous agenda.