Knut De Swert

The Making of the (Issues of the) Vlaams Blok

In Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, one of the strongest extreme right parties of Europe thrives: the Vlaams Blok (the Flemish Bloc). The basic question of this article is straightforward: Do the Flemish media contribute to the success of the Vlaams Blok by emphasizing the themes of the party? The theoretical argument is twofold: agenda setting by the media and issue ownership by parties. The issues the Vlaams Blok owns are determined using two sources: its electoral manifestoes and its electorates motivations to vote for the party. This leads to four issues: Flemish nationalism, immigrant topics, antipolitics issues, and crime-related themes. Using a vast media data set covering three newspapers and two TV stations and stretching over 10 years (1991-2000), we examine to what extent these issues were covered. The analysis shows that especially immigrant topics and crime receive extensive and growing media attention, and time series analysis shows that this rise parallels the electoral growth of the Vlaams Blok. The media could be considered co-responsible for the Vlaams Bloks upsurge.

Where Does Issue Ownership Come From? From the Party or from the Media? Issue-party Identifications in Belgium, 1991-2005

Although widely used in political science to tackle voting behavior and campaign strategy, the issue-ownership thesis remains untested when it comes to the origins of parties’ identification with specific issues. This article explores where issue ownership comes from and/or how it is maintained. The authors test two possible avenues of issue ownership: the party and the mass media. On one hand, parties’ own external communication may stress specific issues, claiming to be best placed to solve these issues. On the other hand, parties could be identified by the media with certain issues, leading to an implicit association between issue and party. The authors test both propositions, drawing on the case of Belgium, a small consociational democracy in Western Europe. Belgium is a good case to examine issue ownership, as its many parties are identified with many issues. Relying on extensive media data and party evidence, they find that issue ownership is related both to party communications and media coverage. This applies in particular to newer, challenging parties that are strongly identified with their core issues. In general, parties’ older communications are drivers of issue ownership; in contrast, recent media coverage contributes to issue ownership. The direction of the causal arrow remains unsure.

Effects of Popular Exemplars in Television News

Common people that are apparently randomly selected by journalists to illustrate a news story (popular exemplars) have a substantial effect on what the audience think about the issue. This effect may be partly due to the mere fact that popular exemplars attract attention and act as attention commanders just like many other speaking sources in the news. Yet, popular exemplars’ effects extend well beyond that of other talking sources. Due to their similarity, trustworthiness, and the vividness of their account, popular exemplars have significantly more impact than experts that are being interviewed or, in particular, than politicians that are quoted in the news. We show this drawing on an internet-based experiment that uses fake television news items as stimuli and that systematically compares the effect of these talking sources in the news. We also find that taking into account preexisting attitudes changes the findings substantially. The effects are more robust and yield a more nuanced picture of what type of exemplars have what kind of effect on what type of public.

When Do Women Get a Voice? Explaining the Presence of Female News Sources in Belgian News Broadcasts (2003—5)

For more than a decade now, it has been demonstrated that female news sources receive little attention in television news. Usually women account for no more than 20—25 percent of total time devoted to people speaking in the news. This article assesses when exactly female news sources are depicted in the news, using a dataset of 25,896 news items and 1600 hours of television, covering public broadcasting and commercial television in Belgium (Flanders) for the years 2003—5. The analysis shows that female news sources are strongly stereotyped and limited to traditional ‘female’ topics. The impact of the gender of the reporter was limited. Contrary to expectations, the broadcasting corporation with a long-standing gender diversity policy actually scored worse than its counterpart without such a policy.The article concludes with a discussion of the apparently difficult relation between traditional news standards and the depiction of gender diversity.