Internationale conflictberichtgeving in de Vlaamse geschreven pers: een longitudinale framing- en representatieanalyse van de Eerste en Tweede Intifada
Literature shows that media coverage of international conflicts is unbalanced and biased. Within the framework of media having an important impact on public perception it is important to research media portrayals of conflicts. Therefore we opted to study the coverage of the First and Second Intifada in the Dutch speaking written press on the basis of a longitudinal framing and representation analysis. In the first place we considered theoretical reflections on the central concepts framing and representation. We paid attention to the content of the terms, identified and considered various frame processes and focussed on important international empirical researches. However the main objective of this dissertation was to carry out a thorough empirical study concerning the newspaper coverage of the First and Second Intifada. As method we opted to combine different research designs. First we developed a new measuring instrument simplifying the identification of frames in the coverage of the First and Second Intifada. We defined and operationalised the selected Intifada frames, considered various methods to research those frames, constructed a new measuring instrument and finally carried out the research. Next to the frame analysis we conducted a representation analysis. International research on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is indeed focussed on representation and less on framing. By studying variables such as the incidence of contextual information, the labelling of acts and actors and the representation of sources and victims it was possible to consider results in an international setting. Through in-depth interviews with journalists involved in the coverage of the Intifadas, we finally confronted our research results with journalistic opinions. Overall we can conclude that discrepancies and evolutions in the coverage of the Intifadas are definitely noticed. However an answer to the central question concerning the unbalance and bias in the coverage is not easy and straight. Some researched variables obviously played into the Israeli hands, others were in favour of the Palestinian actor. But a pro Israeli bias that is observed in various other studies is clearly not supported in this dissertation. In other words the Dutch speaking written press is overall quite balanced contrary to global findings on international news output.
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Universiteit Gent. Faculteit Politieke en Sociale Wetenschappen