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Ample work in political communication showed that high-level politicians get more media attention than their lower ranking colleagues. With power comes media attention. More than hard work, charisma, or experience, it is the political function performed by politicians that is the crucial factor in explaining how much media attention they receive. But what about the opposite relationship: does media attention also generate power? In this paper, we examine the media path leading to power. Basically, two important career steps of politicians are assessed: becoming a party leader and becoming a minister; we test whether, compared to those who did not make a top career, the politicians who came to take these steps were more prominent in the media before they moved up and became elite politicians. We draw on the case of Belgium here and leverage on a longitudinal automated media content analysis (2000–2020) combined with a data set of 532 national/regional politicians and their careers. The study finds that media occurrences matters for being promoted to a top function in Belgium, more so for becoming a minister than for becoming a party leader. Furthermore, rejecting our initial idea based on political mediatization theories, the influence of media occurrence does not seem to increase through time for both functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores gendered representations in Belgian electoral news coverage. Compared to other Western countries, Belgium has consistently reported a small share of female politicians in the news, offering limited insights into the ways they are portrayed. Starting from the observation that the (mainly Anglo-Saxon) body of work on women politicians' representation has reported mixed findings, the study intends to provide a more comprehensive analysis by taking political and contextual factors into account. By means of a quantitative content analysis, we monitored news content prior to the 2019 Belgian elections, resulting in a sample of 981 television, newspaper, radio and web-based news items. The findings confirm the persistence of gendered patterns in Belgian news content, regardless of a candidate's political characteristics. Women were less often represented and their gender, appearance and family life were more often highlighted. Whereas a candidate's political power provided additional insights into gendering, some differences in coverage between candidates could not be explained by either sex or political characteristics. Lastly, differences between media were limited, though web-based news was more negative in tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the increasing attention China has attracted on a global scale over the last few decades, ample academic research has been conducted into the types of China discourses, spread through the media. Studies have pointed at a mounting Sino-phobic discourse in some US media, which prompts the question whether similar attitudes and frames emerge in non-English media narratives. Hence, this study examines how the Belgian as well as the Dutch elite press engage with the new world player. It combines a content analysis, looking into thematic hierarchies and tone/perspective with a critical discourse analysis, retrieving discursive practices, such as evaluative positioning and framing of the country and its main actors. In addition, the article integrates framing research with a Gramscian notion of media hegemony to investigate whether the particular source selection leaves room for a heteroglossic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do mass media determine or codetermine the political agenda? Available answers on this question are mixed and contradictory. Results vary in terms of the type of political agenda under scrutiny, the kind of media taken into account, and the type of issues covered. This article enhances knowledge of the media's political agenda-setting power by addressing each of these topics, drawing on extensive longitudinal measures of issue attentiveness in media, Parliament, and government in Belgium in the 1990s. Relying on time-series, cross-section analyses, the authors ascertain that although Belgium is characterized by a closed political system, the media do to some extent determine the agenda of Parliament and government. There is systematic variation in media effects, however. Newspapers exert more influence than does television, Parliament is somewhat more likely to follow media than government, and media effects are larger for certain issues (law and order, environment) than for others (foreign policy, economic issues). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extends prior consumer mass media expenditures research by proposing two econometric models for testing the principle of relative constancy (PRC). Critique of the PRC; Mass media environment in Belgium; Model building; Inter-media comparisons.