Flemish Newspapers Research Articles

The Construction of a Hybrid Media Storm: A Belgian Case Study

ABSTRACT In today's hybrid media system, amplified news events rage not only in “older” media such as legacy media but also on “newer” digital platforms such as online alternative news media outlets and social media. However, the role of both legacy news media and digital platforms in constructing events has been little explored. This study examines a hybrid media storm surrounding a Belgian political scandal in 2021. Based on a quantitative content analysis of 1,436 print and online articles from six Flemish newspapers and the public broadcaster’s website, 204 articles from three right-leaning alternative media, and 801 tweets between 1 February and 31 October 2021, the study reveals that digital platforms allow actors with little or no voice in legacy news media to influence the narrative of events on those platforms by actively promoting specific frames. Right-leaning alternative media's coverage, although less pluralistic than legacy media, still offers a broader frame repertoire than Twitter where the framing is one-sided. The case study shows that right-leaning alternative media and Twitter do not necessarily broaden the range of views, but are often a crucial factor in the amplification of specific frames at the expense of others.

Unpacking the pornographic paradox: a multimodal critical discourse analysis on the anti/pro porn binary in Flemish news media

ABSTRACT The increasing prevalence of pornographic imagery in Western popular cultures has sparked public debates, with mostly moral panic as a result. Dominant discourses on pornography are mainly concerned with porn’s negative effects on white, male, and heterosexual consumers, whilst often sensationalizing its alleged outcomes. Rooted in the media effects paradigm and drawing from a dominant anglophone anti/pro porn rhetoric, these debates contribute to a transnational understanding of porn as an inherently negative or positive media text. By exclusively focusing on causal–effect relationships, this dominant discourse leaves little room for porn consumers’ unique intersecting identities, experiences, and contexts. The current article maps to what extent local discourses on pornography reflect this binary perspective, by performing a multimodal critical discourse analysis of four Flemish newspapers. By doing so, the article contributes to a move towards more critical perspectives in discourses on pornography.

‘Flanders Conquered the World’s Fair!’ Flemish newspaper discourses and nation-building during the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition

This article examines the meaning of the ‘Flemish Day’ at the Brussels World Exhibition of 1958 for the formation of the Flemish nation. With this one-day festival pro-Flemish organisations contested the francophone character of the Expo, and francophone dominance in Belgian society. Its success announced the steep advance of the Flemish movement in the second half of the twentieth century. But how can we best interpret its impact on Flemish nation-building? The article analyses reactions on the Flemish Day in the Flemish press. Using six newspapers of diverse ideological strands it assesses support for Flemish emancipation. It thereby reveals a broad acceptance of the legitimacy of the Flemish Day, despite remarkable ideological differences. The discourse analysis supports the hypothesis that broadly shared interpretations of, and an almost unanimous identification with Flanders, provided the foundation for the mass spreading of Flemish consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. Contributing empirical evidence to the study of nation-building in post-war Flanders, this article demonstrates the importance of media as mirrors and sources of national discourses.

Media (De)concentration and Editorial Cross-Media Self-Promotion: Evidence from Flanders

ABSTRACT This article asks what the impact is of ownership concentration and deconcentration on editorial cross-media selfpromotion. Zooming in on two significant ownership changes in the small and highly concentrated media market of Flanders (Belgium) in 2017-18, we quantitatively analysed 1,209 articles published in the two largest Flemish newspapers comparing periods before and after two significant moments of ownership concentration and deconcentration. We assess the immediate impact of these changes on cross-media self-promotion between newspapers and audio-visual channels in terms of frequency, length, and presence of visual cues in referencing to media brands belonging to the same mother company and brands that belong to the rival commercial media company. We also measure references to the public broadcaster as a control variable to check whether changes before and after mergers, and/or differences between newspapers from both media groups might be explained by factors other than ownership changes. Our analysis reveals that concentration in Flemish media ownership led to significantly more coverage of the "own" brands of the newspaper’s overarching company. We discuss the broader implications of our Flemish findings, with the two most dominant private media corporations rapidly expanding their brand portfolios in several European countries.

The ‘Black Pete’ debate in Flemish newspapers: from conflict to moderation

ABSTRACT In recent years, a lot of academic attention has been paid to the public discussion on ‘Black Pete’ (Zwarte Piet) in the Low Countries. Black Pete is a much-debated blackface character which is part of the Saint-Nicholas tradition – a yearly festive event taking place at the beginning of December associated with gifts and celebration. ‘Tradition’ versus ‘racism’ seem to be the main arguments in the debate. The current study analyses the debate as it evolved in Flanders from 2012 until 2022, applying Critical Discourse Analysis to find out how the thinking about the event and the Black Pete character, as reflected in the newspapers, changed over a decade. Our sample consists of 143 articles from the four most read newspapers in Flanders (De Standaard, De Morgen, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad). All journalistic genres were included, news reports as well as opinion articles, but also readers’ letters. Based on an analysis of naming, modality and evidentiality (Fairclough [2013]. Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge; Halliday [1994]. An introduction to functional grammar. Arnold), we illustrate and demonstrate how the tone of the debate gradually changed from a discourse of conflict into a discourse of moderation and appeasement.

The discursive construction of a news event: Access and legitimation in the media framing of an escalated anti-asylum protest in Belgium

Abstract In October 2019, the Belgian government announced the opening of an asylum center in a former retirement home, leading to civic and political protest that escalated into arson. We examine the construction of the events before, on, and after the arson by analyzing 135 articles from Flemish newspapers, the public broadcaster’s news website, and alternative media between October 25 and November 30, 2019 using qualitative content analysis. Our analysis emphasizes journalists’ role as gatekeepers, deciding which actors get access and legitimation in media coverage. Focus is on the dynamic process of how events become discursively constructed through the interventions of journalists and their sources attempting to gain primary definer status. Our analysis confirms that institutional sources remain more likely to achieve primary definer status in legacy news media. Alternative media perform similar discursive interventions as legacy news media but utilize them to provide access and legitimacy to different actors and standpoints. In the first days of news coverage, in particular, the narratives developed in right-leaning alternative media seemed to spread in legacy news media. In the following days, governmental actors and experts, through their interventions in legacy news media, were able to steer the discourse in a different direction.

Making it Fit: How Science News Gets Remediated for Facebook and Instagram

ABSTRACT Today’s news users have a wide range of options when it comes to news consumption. Articles can be read on an app, via a news website, on social media or a printed newspaper. To provide these different platforms news media have become integrated newsrooms that shovel news as a standard practice. After posting a news article to the news website, the same news article can later appear on a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. During the transportation from one platform to another the news inevitably undergoes changes. These remediations can be initiated by the platform: format-dependent constraints, e.g., the mandatory addition of a status message; based on preferences of the algorithm; or can be according to the personal preferences of the social media editor. Based on these insights we compiled a unique corpus of 109 news stories that map “a perfect chain” of science news in a one-to-one relationship between the news website, Facebook, and Instagram accounts of three traditional Flemish newspapers. We manually explored the circulation flow of these news posts and identified the corresponding types of news remediation. These results contribute theoretical and practical insights into the affordances, characteristics and constraints of social media news.

Producing Authenticity, Difference and Extremism

Abstract In this article, we explore the framing of religious converts by Dutch and Flemish newspapers in the period 1991–2017. We focus on the differences and commonalities in ways of talking about religious conversions to Christianity and Islam. Our approach is to probe the ‘figure’ of the convert: How is the religious convert framed and understood? We present a typology of figures of the religious convert emerging from our material, including the ‘authentic seeker’, the ‘exemplary believer’, the ‘cultural other’, the ‘victim’, the ‘opportunist’ and the ‘extremist’. This approach allows us to explore how newspapers promote particular notions of conversion, and to show that the framing of religious converts is mediated by religion, gender, race and citizenship.

The Changing Face of Journalistic Autonomy: A Case Study of De Standaard (1976–2020)

ABSTRACT Autonomy is considered a prerequisite for the press to function in service of the public. Over the past few decades, both journalism and society at large have been subjected to significant change and instability, potentially affecting journalists’ independent modes of production. We, therefore, argue that a re-evaluation of journalism’s institutional strength to perform the societal functions bestowed upon it by the public is imperative. This paper attempts to contribute to this re-evaluation by examining to what extent legacy media journalists act according to their own professional logic rather than being historically conditioned to act according to external logics imposed on the field of journalism. We adopt a qualitative historical approach grounded in the theoretical framework of field theory for our examination of the development of journalistic autonomy at Flemish newspaper De Standaard. Based on a rich body of source material that emphasizes the rarely considered perspective of chief editors, we reconstruct journalistic autonomy as a dynamic concept shaped by an intricate web of interconnected macro-, meso- and micro-level developments and interactions.

COVID-19 telephone contact tracing in Flanders as a “contested” new genre of conversation: Discrepancies between interactional practice and media image

During the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium, most COVID-19-related information was communicated to the public through mainstream media such as newspaper outlets, television, and radio. These media had substantial influence over which information was (widely) distributed and how this information was framed, subsequently shaping citizens' interpretations of matters concerning the pandemic. This chapter considers one of the government's endeavors to contain the pandemic: COVID-19 telephone contact tracing. Specifically, we compare the image of such telephone contact tracing generated by the media with the de facto interactional practice. We report on analyses made as part of a 1 year applied conversation analytic and pragmatic study conducted at Ghent University and the University of Antwerp in collaboration with the Flemish Agency of Health and Care. Methodologically, we use thematic content analysis to examine the portrayal of COVID-19 telephone contact tracing in widespread Flemish newspapers and its evolution throughout the pandemic. We then compare this media analysis to our analysis of a corpus of 170 recorded, transcribed, and interactionally analyzed contact tracing calls. Our results demonstrate how the mainstream media's image of contact tracing does not align with the various (interactional) functions of COVID-19 contact tracing calls identified in the study. We argue that this one-sided, distorted image produced by the media may have had considerable consequences for the efficacy of contact tracing, especially because the contact tracing call was a new genre of conversation. It was introduced to the public almost exclusively through mainstream media and, at the same time, its success relied for the most part on citizens' voluntary participation, trust, and willingness to share private information.

Media coverage of Belgium's first criminal case concerning euthanasia for psychiatric patients: A content analysis of Flemish newspapers and magazines.

Belgium is one of the few countries worldwide where euthanasia on the grounds of unbearable suffering caused by a psychiatric disorder is legally possible. In April 2010 euthanasia was carried out on a 38-year-old Belgian woman with borderline personality disorder and/or autism. After a complaint by the family, three physicians were referred to the Court of Assizes on the charge of "murder by poisoning". A content analysis of print and online news coverage of the euthanasia case in a selected sample of Flemish newspapers and magazines, published between December 1, 2019 and March 1, 2020, was conducted to analyze the prominence and framing of the euthanasia case, as well as the portrayal of key figures in this case. A quantitative analysis, as well as an in-depth qualitative analysis (with the aid of NVivo 1.0 software) was performed. One thousand two hundred fifteen news articles were identified through database searching. Of these, 789 articles were included after screening for relevance and eligibility. Mean prominence scores were moderate and did not statistically significantly differ between newspapers with a different historical ideological background or form (elite versus popular). The most frequent headline topics featured legal aspects (relating to the Belgian Euthanasia Law or the course of the trial). Headlines and content of most articles (90 and 89%, respectively) did not contain an essential standpoint on the euthanasia case itself or, if they did, were neutral. Historical ideological background, nor form of newspaper (elite versus popular) significantly influenced headline tone or article direction toward the euthanasia case. Despite this, our qualitative analysis showed some subtle differences in selection, statement or tonality of reports between certain newspapers with a different historical ideological background. Although major Flemish newspapers and magazines generally were neutral in their coverage of the judicial case, major points of contention discussed were: the need for an evaluation and possible amendments to the existing Euthanasia Law, including a revision of the Belgian Control Commission and the system of penalties for physicians, and the absence of any consensus or guidance on how to define psychological suffering.

News, Business and Public Information. Advertisements and Announcements in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers, 1620–1675, written by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree

News, Business and Public Information. Advertisements and Announcements in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers, 1620–1675, written by Arthur der Weduwen and Andrew Pettegree

How vector space models disambiguate adjectives: A perilous but valid enterprise

AbstractThe present study is part of a larger research project developing computational tools for large-scale corpus-based semantic analyses. One such tool represents semantic structure with vector space models (VSMs). The paper shows that this tool and the models built require a deeper understanding, especially with a view to how its results relate to cognitive theories of meaning. Although token-based VSMs are increasingly used in corpus-based cognitive semantics, we believe it is insufficiently appreciated how alternative parameter settings deal with a range of semantic issues, such as granularity of meaning, prototypicality of the domain of application and interaction with syntactic patterns. For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on only one of those issues, viz. the prototypicality of the domain of application, presenting the results of three of our case studies on the Dutch adjectivesheilzaam,hoekig,hachelijkandgeldig. The models presented are built from a 520MW corpus of contemporary Dutch and Flemish newspapers and by varying parameters such as window size, part-of-speech and frequency thresholds in the selection of features. The resulting VSMs are evaluated through visual analytics: although multidimensional, they can be reduced to 2D and represented in scatterplots where more similar tokens appear closer to each other. The color-coding with manual sense tags employed here makes it possible to compare the groupings provided by human annotators with those of the computational models in a way consistent with the cognitive approach to meaning and categorization.

Virtual athlete or ultimate nerd? A framing analysis of eSports in Flemish printed media

Despite the rapid and global increase in popularity and media focus of eSports, many issues remain, not least in terms of how the media portray eSports (players). Considering Flanders (Belgium) has been relatively slow to follow this global uptake, this article adopts an inductive framing approach to analyze exhaustively how eSports are portrayed in 103 Flemish newspaper and magazine articles. Results indicate eSports were represented via eight frames spread across the categories ‘game/industry’ and ‘players’. On the one hand, the Flemish printed media legitimize eSports via comparisons with traditional sports and its applicability to capitalist frameworks such as the sport-industrial complex. On the other hand, player representations remain largely permeated with ‘softer’ stereotypes of laziness as well as with neglecting reference to female players. Subsequently, greater investments by the Flemish government could raise the national prominence of eSports, benefit competitive development, and help tackle issues of stereotyping in the media.

Synthetic Drug Production in Belgium – Environmental Harms as Collateral Damage?

The production of illicit drugs contributes to important environmental harms. In the European context, the production of synthetic drugs, particularly MDMA and amphetamine (and more recently methamphetamine), increasingly poses environmental challenges. The production of these substances in Europe is mainly concentrated in the Netherlands and to a lesser extent in Belgium. In this contribution we focus on the Belgian case, particularly in Flanders—the Belgian region where synthetic drug production has been more present. The goals of our analysis are 1) to document the presence of illicit synthetic drug production and dumping of chemical waste material in that region, 2) to explore the media coverage of environmental harms associated with those activities, and 3) to identify the range of reported environmental harms. We draw on data from the Belgian Federal Police and on an analysis of 289 news articles published in selected Flemish newspapers (2013–2020). The findings indicate that although there is an increasing trend in the presence of synthetic drug production and dumping sites in Belgium, the details on the nature and extent of environmental harms are often unknown. Besides difficulties around detecting certain types of dumping events, there are also important blind spots in terms of the monitoring of environmental hazards by law enforcement agencies and how that information is shared among the relevant actors.

Stigmatisation of schizophrenia, psychosis and autism in flemish newspapers

IntroductionStigma is a major burden and impediment for treatment and recovery in serious mental disorders, especially psychotic disorders. Therefore, it has been proposed to replace the term schizophrenia by psychosis susceptibility or psychosis spectrum disorder.ObjectivesWe have assessed stigma in the media through a 10-year survey of Flemish daily newspapers (2008-2017) by comparing the way schizophrenia and autism are portrayed. We added the term psychosis for the years 2013-17 to assess its suitability as a less stigmatising alternative.MethodsVia the websites of the seven Flemish newspapers, we searched for all articles published between 01 Jan 2008 and 31 Dec 2017 containing the keywords autism, schizophrenia, and related terms. The collected articles (n = 5,337) were then graded to their stigmatising content. We added the term psychosis for the years 2013-17.ResultsIn the collected articles the coverage of autism was mostly positive, whereas the coverage of schizophrenia was predominantly negative. The contrast was very substantial (p < 0.0001) and stable over the years. The portrayal of psychosis turned out to be mostly positive in the broadsheet newspapers and mostly negative in the tabloid papers.ConclusionsThe social stigma attached to schizophrenia and psychosis is poignantly reflected in the Flemish newspapers. The fact that a comparable disorder such as autism is depicted in a much more favourable way than schizophrenia indicates that a more positive image of schizophrenia is not only desirable but also achievable. Psychosis gives mixed results, a finding up for discussion.

Meer van hetzelfde? Content sharing bij Vlaamse DPG Media-kranten

Abstract Content sharing at DPG Media’s Flemish newspaper brands Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region Flanders has seen a wave of mergers & acquisitions (M&As) in recent years, leading to, according to the government-owned media watchdog, a highly concentrated Flemish media market (). The latest newly founded company is DPG Media, in which the majority of all commercially owned major Flemish news outlets has seen its newsrooms merged into the same Antwerp-based building in early 2020. In this paper, we assess content homogeneity between the print and online versions of the two main newspapers of DPG Media by coding and analysing a sample of articles from 2018, 2019 and 2020. Results reveal only limited increases in shared content for the time being. Through distinguishing betweeninternaland external media concentration, the study serves as a steppingstone towards further content analysis research, in Flanders and beyond.

Eastern others: Homonationalism in the Flemish press

Jasbir Puar introduced the notion of ‘homonationalism’ to describe the increasing acceptance of sexual minorities in Western nations, leading to their incorporation in the national in-group which is increasingly opposed to homophobic ‘others’. While Muslims constitute the main out-group, other groups and nations are also targeted, in particular Russia and related countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Such discourses create a binary opposition between two homogenized parties, the uniformly LGBTQ-friendly in-group versus the uniformly homophobic ‘other’. While the literature on homonationalism mostly discusses politics in the U.S. and a number of other nation-states, this article explores homonationalism in a smaller sub-national region in Western Europe, Flanders, focusing on the press as a tool for spreading homonationalist discourse. Exploring three months of Flemish newspapers, this article identifies some instances of explicit homonationalism but more implicit homonationalism which does not explicitly mention the in-group but does paint a one-sided picture of Russia and related countries as homophobic.

Media Framing of Integration in Belgian Newspapers

ABSTRACTI deconstruct the distinctive facets of mediated framing of integration through a textual analysis of Flemish newspapers. Using Entman’s framing theory, I identified four primary integration frames: Fortress Europe, Streamlined Labour, Solipsistic Representation, and Competing Integration Frames. Specifically, I describe the ambivalence of media framing, which intertextually borrows from dominant representation of (im)migrants. The papers simultaneously frame integration as an assimilative social contract to be agreed to by (im)migrants and as a responsibility of the host society to integrate (im)migrants. Counter-framing, present in all four media frames, is critical to both dismantling systemic marginalization and ameliorating processes of integration.

Why and how higher media concentration equals lower news diversity – The Mediahuis case

This article critically assesses the effects of media mergers on news diversity at Mediahuis, one of the leading players in the media market of the Belgian region of Flanders. The founding of Mediahuis (in 2013) has led to an extremely concentrated Flemish newspaper market, as it owns and publishes four of the seven daily newspapers. We conducted ethnographic research inside the newsroom of Het Nieuwsblad, Mediahuis’ biggest newspaper, and assess the editorial independence, the changes journalists face on a daily basis due to ongoing digitalization, changing roles and values both within and beyond journalism, and the effect of the merger on the media management of what is now Mediahuis. We also performed an in-depth news diversity study in which we analysed over 3000 newspaper articles appearing in 2013 and 2018 in the four papers. Using this mixed method approach of combining ethnographic research and content analyses, the global results of this study reveal that while the editorial independence has been fairly well maintained, there has been a drastic increase in the number of articles being recycled across newspapers. Overall, over half of all articles produced for four of the seven Flemish newspapers are recycled in at least two of the four Mediahuis newspapers on a daily basis, with an increase from 36 to 51 per cent between 2013 and 2018. This practice has been facilitated by lowering the total number of working journalists, and sharing a content management system which facilitates copy-pasting articles across newspapers and websites.