Media Narratives of Disaster: Social Representations of the 2024 Megafire 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 objective of this paper is to describe how Chilean media outlets addressed this megafire during the wildfire management process, considering the agenda during the whole wildfire season in Chile. The methodological approach is based on a multi-stage strategy for news classification based on the wildfire lifecycle: prevention (before), response (during), and recovery (after). We have employed a mixed-method design that integrates manual and computational techniques (topic analysis) as a triangulation technique on the same social network data. This study automatically collects articles related to the Valparaiso megafire, which occurred in 2024, from 140 Chilean media sources, considering print, radio, and television media. The main finding indicates that news coverage predominantly frames the Valparaiso megafire as a particular event in a short period of time. The media coverage does not focus on wildfire concepts such as nature, state management, policy, and the relationship between state and citizen. Finally, the automated analysis of emerging topics in the articles belonging to each manual category provides a consistent description of the social representations identified through manual analysis.