Search

Forcibly displaced people often face restrictive migration policies and stereotypical discourses. Therefore, this study analyzes UNHCR's public communication strategies towards the Syrian and Central African crises. Through a comparative-synchronic multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of UNHCR's (international) press releases (N = 28), news stories (N = 233), photos (N = 462) and videos (N = 50) of 2015, we examined its main representation and argumentation strategies. First, we found that UNHCR primarily represents forcibly displaced people in its press releases and news as victimized and/or voiceless masses, reproducing humanitarian savior and deservingness logics. However, stories, photos, and videos frequently portray them also as empowered individuals. This can be partially explained by media logics and political and private sector discourses and agenda-building opportunities. Moreover, UNHCR mainly voices pity-based and post-humanitarian Self-oriented solidarity discourses, and links protection to states’ (perceived) interests. Finally, these discursive strategies respond to dominant migration management paradigms and the increasingly neoliberalized, political realist international refugee regime (IRR).

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major health concern as the world population ages. Yet, few studies have examined what the public over the age of 50 knows about AD. This qualitative study, based on 40 in-depth interviews, examines the knowledge of AD by Flemish people between 50 and 80 years old and their cross-source engagement with information sources. Building on AD media representations and theories on media complementarity and health information behaviour, we find that respondents mostly encounter AD information non-purposively via traditional mass media and interpersonal communication, while the internet is occasionally used to purposefully seek information. Novels, personal experiences/social proximity, public figures and particularly film stand out as channels and sources of AD information, suggesting that fictional narratives, personal experiences and being able to identify with others leave lasting impressions and help to communicate and disperse AD information. However, common misconceptions and gaps in knowledge persist, including AD being considered part of the normal ageing process and old age as well as confusing AD with Parkinson's disease. The biomedical perspective and the tragedy discourse prevail among the majority of respondents, who describe AD in terms of decline, loss and death and as ‘the beginning of the end’. Only a few, typically female respondents, appear aware of the role of individual health behaviour and lifestyle choices to prevent dementia or delay its onset. The misconceptions of AD and gaps in knowledge, as well as the fact that a third of all cases of dementia might be delayed or prevented by managing lifestyle and other risk factors, stress the importance of public educational programmes and the need to emphasise and raise awareness of preventative behaviour. Overall, the findings from this study can be of help to public health communicators and dementia-awareness campaigns, as well as AD training programmes for health-care professionals and family care-givers.

This study explores the discursive construction of online privacy through a critical discourse analysis of Flemish newspapers' coverage of privacy, teens, and Facebook between 2007 and 2018 to determine what representation of (young) users the papers articulate. A privacy-as-control discourse is dominant and complemented by two other discourses: that of the unconcerned and reckless teenager and that of the promise of media literacy. Combined, these discourses form an authoritative language on privacy that we call "control responsibility." Control responsibility presents privacy as an individual responsibility that can be controlled and needs to be learned by young users. We argue that the discourses contribute to a neoliberal rationality and have a disciplinary effect that strengthens various forms of responsibilization.

The current research focuses on the role of frame sponsors, more specifically politicians of the six main Flemish political parties (N-VA, Open Vld, CD&V, sp.a, Groen or Vlaams Belang), in framing the public debate about migration in the news as well as on social media. More specifically, we investigated the presence of four frames: the intruder frame, the victim frame, the wealth gap frame and the win-win frame (Van Gorp et al., 2018). We collected statements on migration or migrants made by Flemish politicians between 1 January 2016 and 30 June 2018 in four different types of media. We selected the five most read national newspapers: Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad, De Standaard, De Morgen, and De Tijd. The television news items were collected from the 19h daily newscast VTM Nieuws (commercial broadcaster) and 19h daily newscast Het Journaal (public broadcaster VRT, Eén). On Twitter and Facebook, we included the official accounts of the political parties as well as the official accounts of their most important politicians (party leaders, Ministers and State Secretaries in the Federal and Flemish government, party experts on migration). In each of the four media, the units of registration are the statements by Flemish politicians containing at least one of the keywords “migration” or “migrant”. We only selected the verbatim quotes by politicians. The newspaper data were collected through the GoPress database, the TV items through the ENA (Elektronisch Nieuwsarchief) database, the Twitter data using the Twitter API, and the Facebook data by means of a manual scraping (due to practical limitations only the 50 most recent posts). The study was conducted by two independent coders. The intercoder reliability test resulted in strong kappa values (ranging from 0.617 to 1). We collected 1528 statements of 82 politicians representing the six parties; 47.9% (732) from N-VA, 27.1% (414) Vlaams Belang, 8.2% (125) Open Vld, 6.0% (91) CD&V, 5.9% (90) sp.a, and 5.0% (76) Groen. Importantly, only 245 of these statements contain one of the four researched frames (16.0%). This is not a surprise, since a lot of quotes are just factual and too short to contain framing or reasoning devices. The intruder frame is by far the most used frame (73.1%), followed by the victim frame (22.0%), wealth gap frame (3.7%), and win -win frame (1.2%). Vlaams Belang (38.8%) had the most framed statements, shortly followed by N-VA (35.9%). Both parties used the intruder frame the most. In contrast, the other four parties used the victim frame the most. We also found differences in frame use depending on the media type. The overrepresentation of the intruder frame on Twitter and television is related to the dominance of N -VA and Vlaams Belang accounts in these platforms. We also compared the framed statements in the media to the official views as carried out in the parties’ election programs (2014) which turn out to be more neutral, less emotional and comprise more alternatively framed statements about migration.

Journalists domesticate news about distant events to bring such events closer to the audience and thus make them more relevant and appealing; however, knowledge about the actual audience’s reactions toward domesticated news is lacking. Central to this study is understanding how an audience makes use of domestication strategies in viewing and reacting to mediated distant suffering. Earlier text-based research has found several ways of domesticating distant suffering that can invite an audience to care. Building further on this media-centered study, 10 focus groups reveal a two-flow model of domestication, consisting of first-level domestication on the production side by journalists and second-level domestication, in which audience members themselves use strategies of domestication to make sense of distant suffering.

Several scholars have identified an important emotional role in news media’s covering of international disasters; inviting the audience to care for people in need who are not like us. This article addresses the question of how news media can attribute a local sense of relevance to global suffering by focusing on the journalistic practice of domestication. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have domesticated international disasters in 2011. As the study shows, rendering distant suffering more relevant to local audiences can be realized in several ways. A critical discourse analysis identified four key discursive modes of domestication. By drawing on these modes, news journalists try to incite involvement in their representations of distant suffering, hence inviting the local audience to relate with the distant other. Domestication can lead to possible feelings of cosmopolitanism and identification, although dominant power relations of global inequality remain largely unchallenged.

For most people living in western countries, disasters are a priori cases of distant suffering as they mainly affect cultural or ethnic others. News media thus play a pivotal role in giving publicity and meaning to the numerous instances of global suffering as it is essentially through media reports that the (western) world witnesses international disasters. Accordingly, several scholars define a disaster as a media construction; they exist only when recognized and covered by the media. This paper focuses on the conceptualization of a disaster as a media construction by exploring the inherently selective nature of news coverage, the representation of suffering in Flemish news media and the possible societal implications.

News carries a unique signifying power, a power to represent events in particular ways (Fairclough, 1995). Applying Critical Discourse Analysis and Chouliaraki’s theory on the mediation of suffering (2006), this article explores the news representation of the 2003 global SARS outbreak. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have covered the international outbreak of SARS. By looking into the mediation of four selected discursive moments, underlying discourses of power, hierarchy and compassion were unraveled. The analysis further identified the key role of proximity in international news reporting and supports the claim that Western news media mainly reproduce a Euro-American centered world order. This article argues that news coverage of international crises such as SARS constructs and maintains the socio-cultural difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’ as well as articulating global power hierarchies and a division of the world in zones of poverty and prosperity, danger and safety.