The impact of cultural, economic, and safety issues in Flemish television news coverage (2003–13) of North African immigrants on perceptions of intergroup threat

ABSTRACT

The current research examines television news as a contextual determinant of intergroup threat from North African immigrants in Flanders (i.e. the northern part of Belgium). We content analyse the prevalence of intergroup threats in television news over an eleven-year period (2003–13), and take an experimental approach to examine the impact of these threatening news stories on perceived threats from North African immigrants. The content analysis revealed that (combinations of) safety and cultural issues were widespread in television news content. Experimental evidence showed that exposure to safety and cultural issues in news content increased perceptions of safety and cultural threat accordingly, but exposure to economic issues revealed no effect for economic threat. We conclude by emphasizing the potential of television news content in affecting perceptions of intergroup threat, particularly for those threats which are commonly present in the news and readily accessible in natives’ minds.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergroup threat theory
• media
• television news
• experiment
• content analysis
• Belgium

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Julie De Smedt as project coordinator of “Steunpunt Media” for the collection of the news items, Christophe Lesschaeve and Stefaan Walgrave from the University of Antwerp for the use of the M²P panel, Peter Verlinden for recording the voice-over used in the experiment, and two anonymous reviewers, Marc Hooghe, Cecil Meeusen, Anna Berbers, and Lennert Coenen for their helpful comments on our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We use “natives” versus “immigrants” for reasons of space and readability, but we recognize that the category “native” may also include second- and third-generation immigrants. However, when asked about intergroup attitudes in Europe, individuals tend to not differentiate between second- and third-generation immigrants who were born in the host country from immigrants who were born outside of the host country (Pettigrew et al. 1997).

2 We refer to both immigrants who were born outside of Belgium and second- and third-generation immigrants from North Africa.

3 The search string (available upon request) was designed to grasp references to ethnic minorities and immigrants by selecting mentions of nationality, ethnicity, or minority group status, as well as integration and minority issues, such as racism, religion, and integration.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council [ERC Advanced Grant number 295920].