Web hosting Custom Email SiteBuilder

An overview of research and examples of good practice in the EU Member States, 1995-2000, on behalf of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, Vienna (EUMC) by the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) - edited by Jessika ter Wal, Vienna, February 2002.

by Frieda Saeys and Tomas Coppens, Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University

The specific structure of the Belgian State implies research on racism and cultural diversity in the media on different policy levels. Since media and equal opportunities are competencies of the linguistic-cultural communities in Belgium (Dutch-speaking, French-speaking or German-speaking), reports tend to concentrate on the situation in one of those regions. The Dutch-speaking region of Flanders seems to generate the major part of empirical data on this issue. Much of the Flemish research projects on racism and cultural diversity in the media are inspired by the strong presence and electoral success of the Vlaams Blok, a right-wing populist party in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. A surge of research about racism and media followed, the electoral breakthrough of the Vlaams Blok in 1991. In more recent years a smaller number of research has been conducted on this issue, although racism and cultural diversity remain major topics in a few research institutions.

The other linguistic-cultural communities do not have significant racist parties and therefore the topic of racism seems less researched, certainly when it comes to the role of the media. French-speaking scholars, mainly from the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, often discuss journalistic deontology, including legal issues and the question of how the media should deal with far-right parties. But empirical data are rare and most research in the French-speaking community consequently falls out of the scope of this project.

Justice, and therefore the laws on racism, is still a federal issue resulting in some national publications, often co-ordinated by national institutions such as the King Baudouin Foundation, the Federal Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism, and the Association of Belgian Professional Journalists.

Recent empirical data on how ethnic minorities, or topics related to racism and cultural diversity, are presented in the media were only found for the Flemish Community. We will report about two major projects carried out at Ghent University. The first project (1993-1996) focused on how certain topics are reported in the media, and resulted in recommendations for a journalistic code of practice. The second project (1998-2000) deals with the people who appear in the news.

A large-scale research project on multiculturalism in Flemish media was carried out for the Association of Belgian Professional Journalists, and funded by the King Baudouin Foundation and the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism. This study has led to several publications [and its] aim was to find out how multi-culturalism and related topics were normally reported in Flemish news media, both in ‘routine reporting’ and ‘crisis reporting’.

‘Routine’ news was selected if certain keywords were present in the article or item:

This method generated 187 ‘routine’ newspaper articles in one week [in] May 1993 [when] no special event related the topic occurred. The articles came from the national Flemish newspapers, both the popular and quality press, conservative and progressive.

The main results, generated by a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, were:

Analysis of ‘routine’ television news (77 news items from both the public and the private broadcaster, in [one] week [in] December 1993 led to these conclusions:

A racial attack in Solingen, Germany, in May 1993, was chosen as the ideal subject to analyse crisis reporting in the Flemish national newspapers. The researchers found that:

Regarding crisis reporting produced by television news, researchers examined the May 1991 riots in Vorst, Brussels, involving ethnic, minorities, [picking] 22 items in total. The results were [that]:

The results of this study led to six recommendations for journalists about how to deal with these issues:

In 1995, a smaller, explorative study was carried out to see if these recommendations had been followed. It showed that although some individual reporters seemed to respect the guidelines, no overall, substantial improvement could be recorded. Similar, smaller projects suggested the same.

In 1999, other guidelines for journalists were published. The ngo Extreem Rechts, Nee Bedankt, Extreme Right, No Thanks, which is a network for nearly 300 organisations, published directions about how to report on the far-right. The most important recommendation was to emphasise that far-right parties are not normal, democratic, parties like the other political parties. The "Recommendations for reporting on the extreme Right" [published in] 1999 contain many concrete suggestions:

In an ongoing project, the Department of Communication Sciences at Ghent University monitors the representation of ethnic minorities in the Flemish news media through a longitudinal research called MediaWatch. It uses a content analysis to measure women’s representations in the news [on] newspapers, radio and television. Ghent University has adapted and expanded this model to include ethnic minorities, disabled persons and the elder-ly. All items in the selected radio and television news broadcasts were coded; for the newspaper sample, only the most important articles (i.e. those on the front page) were coded. After an experimental phase, this design was used in 1998 and 2000 to gather data on gender, age, and ethnicity of people in the news. Preliminary results show a marginal presence of ethnic minorities as people in the Dutch-speaking news. These results are based on the coding of a sample of 12 television newscasts from both the public broadcasting company VRT and the private channel VTM, which generated a total of 689 coded persons (coding categories were based on appearance). It is striking that Turks and Moroccans, who represent two main groups of non-EU immigrants in Belgium, appear only in 1.5 % and 1.7 % of the national and local news items respectively. [It is worth noting that] in Flandres, the latest census of 1991 showed that there were 42,681 Turks and 42,728 Moroccans on a population of about 6 million Flemish [persons].

Operationalising the notion about ethnicity is a difficult issue in any case, but in a content analysis of television news, one only has the picture of the person, or subtitles when available, to determine his or her ethnicity. Ethnicity is therefore closely linked to ‘race’, which is, in this analysis, an important determinant of the person’s ethnicity. However, in many cases ethnicity was explicitly mentioned making the coding of this variable somewhat easier.

In the MediaWatchprogramme, variables concerning ethnic minorities are used on two different levels: that of the story and the person. On the story level, the question is asked whether ethnicity is the central focus in the story (or one of many other themes). The researcher then classifies the news story according to its central themes.

Another aspect of media content that has been documented, besides the representation of ethnic minorities, is the discourse on racism and cultural diversity spread by the media. In 1998 some interesting conclusions have been reported. The study does not focus on the media per se but on the discourse produced by government institutions, politicians and social scientists and the discourse of official government publications, political documents, research reports and the mass media.

The analysis was started in the late 1980s and data-gathering peaked in 1992-1993. Most of the data reproduced by the media comes from seven newspapers, three weekly magazines as well as public radio and television broadcasts, [being] all mainstream sources and all Flemish. Extremist publications were ignored. The authors followed a linguistic-pragmatic analy-sis based on the notion that all forms of communication are accompanied by more or less hidden meaning systems that help to determine the interpretation of what is said. This analysis typically revealed certain word choices and strategies (e.g. the use of ‘demonstration’ as opposed to ‘riot’), constructions of implicit information, global meaning and interaction patterns.

Regarding word choice, the term most often used to classify ethnic minorities is ‘migrant’ which usually refers to people’s geographical origin, mostly Turks and Moroccans. The discourse refers to the category of ‘asylum seekers’ as another large segment of ethnic minorities. Both political and economic refugees are labelled this way. Meanwhile, no clear definitions of any of these terms are given in the media.

The work gives examples of explicit or implicit, positive or negative statements about ethnic minorities. Implicit positive and explicit negative statements are rare in main-stream Belgian media. Explicit positive statements do occur, mainly in official sources where ‘migrants’ are often represented as bringing economic benefits or enriching ‘our’ culture. The bulk of state-ments about ethnic minorities are implicitly negative, however. One example is a newspaper article entitled: ‘Older migrants don’t cause trouble’. At first glance this seems like a positive message, but the article itself focuses on the contrast between the ‘older’migrants referred to in the title and young migrant groups, called ‘gangs’.

It is interesting how the term ‘racism’ is constructed in political discourse, where it refers to ‘those expressions of xenophobia, which go hand in hand with extreme, fascist points of view’. In discourse, ‘racism’ is constructed as ‘hostility towards ethnic minorities’, whereas ‘xenophobia’ is seen as ‘aversion towards ethnic minorities’. One disturbing conclusion is that ‘xenophobia’ in political discourse is often seen as ‘rather normal’ which leads to the normalisation of anti-foreigner feelings. ‘Racism’ is seen as very negative, although even racism can be seen as normal if the number of foreigners should exceed a certain ‘threshold of tolerance’. In other words, xenophobia is not presented as a very negative feeling, and even racism can be acceptable if the number of foreigners is high enough. This discourse clearly sees cultural diversity as essentially problematic.

This is further proven by analysis on the discourse about homogeneity (the monocultural society). Discourse analysis on this issue shows that a uniform and homogenous society is presented as an ideal, which is still talked about in the mainstream media. Even well intentioned official documents by anti-racist organisations reveal a similar discourse. The example given by the authors is that of a flier distributed by an anti-racist organisation, which starts with the sen-tence: "No one can deny that the presence of migrants in our country created problems." This is a striking example of how diversity is immediately seen as abnormal, not only in mainstream media but even in anti-racist publications.

The conclusion is that "the Belgian migrant debate is essentially based on a distancing and confrontational view of us versus the other, captured in (often implicit) terms of normality versus abnormality".

The notion of non-discrimination is present in every media law that binds Belgian media, whether it is on a European, Belgian, or regional level:

Although the anti-racism law dates back to 1981, it is only in recent years that the law is enforced. One of the main reasons for a more pro-active anti-racist policy was a change in the Belgian Constitution (7 May 1999) making racist or xenophobic messages easier to prosecute. Since then, many lawsuits have been filed against alleged racist messages, persons and institutions, most of which are still working their way through the courts. The first case tried under the new legislation was against a Vlaams Blok official who, following a complaint by the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism, was convicted for spreading racist messages on the Internet in 2000. The most notable case, however, is that of a lawsuit filed in October 2000 by the aforementioned anti-racism Centre and by the Flemish ngo Liga voor de Mensenrechten (Human Rights League). In this case, different organisations affiliated with the Vlaams Blok are being sued for spreading discriminatory messages and inciting hatred against ethnic minorities. A conviction could have serious consequences for the Vlaams Blok. Like every other political party, the Government funds it. A conviction may lead to the end of public funding for the party.

In its 1999 annual report, the Interdepartmental Commission for Ethnic-Cultural Minorities of the Flemish community reported about an affirmative action plan drawn up by the Flemish public broadcaster VRT. This action plan focuses on two main subjects: increasing recruitment, and establishing a balanced representation of ethnic minorities.

The first goal should be obtained by screening the VRT’s recruitment procedures to detect possible discriminatory thresholds and by advertising vacancies via minorities’ interest groups or networks. Although ethnicity is not registered in the personnel database, the number of minority employees at VRT is estimated at 30 out of a total of over 2,000 employees.

The public broadcaster hopes to obtain the second goal of representation by creating a database of professionals and experts from minority groups as a ready reference tool for journalists and programme makers. This should increase the visibility of ethnic minorities in VRT programmes.

A workshop meeting concerning this plan showed that few young people from minorities choose courses that prepare them for a career in the media. Also, the explicit mention that the VRT encourages minority groups to apply for a vacancy, appears to have little. However, the public broadcasting service of the French-speaking community, RTBF, has no concrete plans to improve the non-recruitment or non-representation of ethnic minorities, despite legal obligations to do so.

As far as government campaigns are concerned, there is only one that was recently conducted by the federal government and the Belgian Football Union. During the European Football Championships in June 2000, a small information film was aired on television portraying the Belgian national team (several players are members of ethnic minorities) and calling upon viewers to fight racism.

The research done on the topic of racism and cultural diversity in the media reveals some interesting facts. One large study showed that ethnic issues are frequently related to the policy areas of justice, criminality and asylum. It has also been established that ethnic minorities are often portrayed as one homogeneous group (mostly called ‘migrants’). Individual examples of bad practices in reporting about ethnic minorities have been found. Explicit negative statements about ethnic minorities are rare, however, at least as far as the mainstream media are concerned. Implicit negative statements were more common and mainly led to an us versus them mindset. The research led to recommendations aimed at journalists concerning how they should deal with news stories concerning ethnic minorities. Whether these guidelines are followed remains to be seen, however. Other recommendations from a local ngo advise journalists about how they should handle reports about the far-right.

Although several laws and decrees contain provisions about non-discrimination, active policies to strengthen cultural diversity are rare. So far, only the Flemish public broadcaster VRT has made an attempt in pursuing a recruitment policy in favour of ethnic minorities. However, this may be changing.

A very interesting development is provided by a recent change in the Belgian Constitution making racism in the media easier to prosecute. Early cases suggest a crackdown on racist messages, although the big test is the one against the Vlaams Blok, which could take years to conclude.

Racism and xenophobia, therefore, do exist in Belgian media, implicitly in mainstream media and explicitly, and prosecuted, in extreme right media.