Assessing News Content Diversity in Flanders: An Empirical Study at DPG Media

Exploring the link between media concentration and news content diversity using automated text analysis

“…At both firms, though, the quality or elite titles have been able to maintain more independence. As previous studies found that the latter news brands are less prone to homogenising their news content (Beckers et al, 2017;Hendrickx and Van Remoortere, 2021), we venture that this will hold too for the study at hand.…”

“…Scholarship, however, remains divided on the topic. Depending on the vantage point of researchers and the media market(s) they analysed, they either established a negative link (Badr, 2021; Baum and Zhukov, 2019; Blankenship and Vargo, 2021; Boczkowski and de Santos, 2007; Hendrickx and Ranaivoson, 2019; Hendrickx and Van Remoortere, 2021; Redden and Witschge, 2010; Vogler et al, 2020) or at least no outspoken negative link (Beckers et al, 2017; Sjøvaag, 2014; Skärlund, 2020) between heightened media concentration and news content diversity.…”

News packaging during a pandemic: A computational analysis of news diffusion via Facebook

“…News content, as the obvious result of production, too has been altered by the pandemic, and just a few studies have already assessed this empirically at the time of writing. Hendrickx and Van Remoortere (2021) found that news content was shared considerably more between two leading Belgian newspapers during the first months of the pandemic when compared to preceding time frames, with negative effects on content and overall news diversity. In a cross-border study, which is slightly more aligned with our own study, Mellado et al (2021) studied the use of sources in pandemic-related reporting of 78 mainstream news outlets from Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.…”

“…This set of news media includes the eight traditional daily newspaper and magazine titles, two TV channels (of which one is public and one commercial) and seven online-only or so-called alternative news titles (of which three are distinctly left-wing oriented and two are right-wing). The outlets were chosen based on their presence and activity on Facebook in line of previous research (Hendrickx and Van Remoortere, 2021) and by constituting a diverse breadth of neutral, left-wing and right-wing news outlets. The full list of brands is available from the authors upon reasonable request.…”

Prophets, puppets, and pinheads: Contesting the authority of science in the COVID-19 era

“…1 To study popular contestations of the authority of science we therefore conducted a qualitative content analysis of Facebook comments on a Belgian newspaper article about the COVID-19 crisis that features an influential Belgian virologist. 2 The article was published in Het Laatste Nieuws (translated "The Latest News," further referred to as HLN), "Flanders' [Dutch speaking region of Belgium] main news brand in terms of consumption and popularity in print and online" (Hendrickx et al, 2021(Hendrickx et al, : 2140. HLN is particularly useful for our study, because compared to more highbrow Belgian newspapers that cater principally to the higher educated, its readership is more or less equally distributed across educational levels (Information Center for Media [CIM], 2020; Picone and Deweppe, 2015), and because contemporary distrust toward science is more typical of the lower than the higher educated (e.g.…”