Social imaginaries on wildfires, burning practices, and fire management in two Colombian national newspapers: tensions between risk, illegality, and ecological function

Introduction This article analyzes the construction of social imaginaries about the application of fire in two Colombian national newspapers, El Tiempo and El Espectador , based on three key concepts understood as distinct discursive categories: fire use and management, burning practices, and wildfires. Methodology A mixed-methods approach is adopted, combining artificial intelligence tools with qualitative analysis. The quantitative phase employs a BETO model to classify the evaluative framing of fire, while the qualitative phase utilizes a discursive analysis. The corpus consists of 504 items published in El Tiempo and El Espectador between 2020 and 2025. Results The findings show that, in the coverage of both newspapers, the application of fire is primarily represented as a problematic practice, associated with risk, illegality, and destruction. This trend is quantified by the predominance of negative valuations within the corpus. Based on the automatic classification of text fragments, 71% present a negative valuation, compared to 29% neutral. Specifically, “burning practices” concentrate 87.5% negative valuations and 12.5% neutral, while “wildfires” record 68% negative and 32% neutral, with no positive valuations identified in the manually annotated sample. In contrast, “fire use and management” has marginal visibility in the corpus, with only 24 news items; their manual classification as complete news items, reported separately because of its different unit and procedure, shows that 15 (62%) were positive and 9 (38%) negative, despite the potential of this concept to recognize ecological and territorial functions. Discussion These findings suggest that terminological distribution may contribute to consolidating interpretive frameworks that reduce the complexity of the phenomenon. Consequently, the analyzed coverage tends to leave the ecological and cultural dimensions of fire in the background, which may limit the legitimacy of integrated management approaches in environmental governance.