Media Narratives of Disaster: Social Representations of the 2024 Mega-Fire in Valparaíso

In Chile, human activity is a key factor in the occurrence and impact of wildfires in the wildland–urban interface, as more than 95% of such events are anthropogenic in origin. The 2024 Valparaíso megafire represents the most severe incident in the past three decades, with significant consequences for both the affected population and local infrastructure. In disaster contexts, the media play a crucial role in shaping social representations by establishing analytical categories within society. Therefore, the primary objective of this chapter is to describe how Chilean media outlets addressed this megafire. The methodological approach is based on a multi-stage strategy for news classification, employing a mixed-method design that integrates manual and computational techniques. The study collects articles from 140 Chilean media sources. The main finding indicates that news coverage predominantly frames the fire as an event, rather than emphasizing other identified representations: nature and the managing State, the policing State, and the State–citizen relationship. Finally, the automated analysis of emerging topics across the articles further elaborates and reinforces the representations identified through manual coding.