Flanders in the foreign press

Flanders in the foreign press: a discursive analysis of the news production process

This two-year research project examines the representation of Flanders in the foreign press. How do European newspapers report on Flanders? Which processes (information flows) channel this news coverage? By studying the production contexts, this project sets out to generate ethnographically grounded knowledge about the media representation of Flemish public  and cultural diplomacy. Methodologically, a combination of corpus analysis and fieldwork is employed. First, we analyze a corpus of news reports from The Netherlands, the UK, France and Germany around a number of Flemish ‘critical discourse moments’ (the credit crisis in Belgium, the 2008 government formation, the nursery killings in Dendermonde). Next, we conduct ethnographic interviews and fieldwork among some of the stakeholders in the news production process concerning Flanders: foreign correspondents, journalists, insitutions and socioeconomic governement agencies.