Depiction of immigration in television news: A comparison between public and commercial broadcasters

The media plays an important role in mental representations as it constitutes the main source of knowledge about many issues, contributing to the “common sense” understanding of the world (e.g. d’Haenens & Mattelart, 2011: 237). It affects the way in which the local population will act and react. As is demonstrated in this book, this is even truer for reporting about immigration, as most people will never meet refugees in person but will instead refer to real-life experiences communicated to them by the media. In this sense Tétu (2004) argues that even if there is a break in the timing of the broadcast and discordance between the original context and the reception context, the ‘direct’ aspect of the news automatically turns the viewer into a witness.Regarding immigration news, many content and discursive analyses focus on European newspapers (Baker et al. 2008; Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2015). These studies either concentrate on how minority groups are represented in the news (Van Dijk, 1991), on the framing used to depict the immigration processes (Van Gorp, 2005; De Cleen et al. 2017) or on the linguistic patterns (Gabrielatos & Baker, 2008; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016; Calabrese & Mistiaen, 2018).Given the difficulties associated with gathering TV news items, fewer studies focus on TV channels. Only a few concentrate on the framing of the language of TV news items pertaining to immigration and its impact on opinions (see for instance Lecheler, Bos & Vliegenthart, 2015). In Belgium, recent studies look at the way public and commercial broadcasters deal with immigration topics (Jacobs, Meeusen & d’Haenens, 2016; Meeusen & Jacobs, 2017). This chapter contributes to these efforts by studying Belgian French-language immigration TV news.We believe that different processes are used by each media platform to report an external situation to the news audience, and that these different processes will trigger different reactions. Based on images and language interfaces, different media will also organize their own rhetoric according to what they think their audience expects (Tétu, 2004: 9-10).In this chapter, we intend to investigate, through a lexical analysis, whether and if so, how public and commercial Belgian French-language TV newscasts diverge in their coverage of the refugee crisis. We hypothesize that the distinct logic of both types of broadcasters (public and commercial) will be reflected in news items on immigration.We shall first describe the Belgian media context and our hypotheses, corpus partition and methodology, before moving to findings and discussion.