‘Terrorism’ and the Media in Flanders. A Comparison between the Media Coverage of the Hans Van Themsche shooting in 2006 and the Mehdi Nemmouche shooting in
2014.
Author: Alexander Lindemans
Student Number: 11108991
Main Supervisor: Krisztina Lajosi
Second Supervisor: Marjet Brolsma
June 2016
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TABLE OF CONTENTS X. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 3 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 4 2. THEORY: TERRORISM AND THE MEDIA...... 7 2.1 Tracing the ‘origins’ of Terrorism ...... 7 2.2 Defining Terrorism: The Impossible Task? ...... 12 2.3 The Role of the Media: Framing...... 20 2.4 Influence of the Media ...... 27 3. METHODS AND CASE STUDIES ...... 30 3.1 Relevance of this study ...... 30 3.2 Sources ...... 31 3.3 Content Analysis: How does it work? ...... 34 3.4 The Cases ...... 35 3.4.1 Antwerp 2006 ...... 35 3.4.2 Brussels 2014 ...... 36 4. FINDINGS ...... 38 4.1 Total amount of coverage ...... 38 4.1.1 Coverage over time...... 40 4.2 First day of coverage ...... 41 4.2.1 Antwerp 2006 ...... 41 4.2.2 Brussels 2014 ...... 42 4.2.3 Comparison ...... 43 4.3 Labelling the Perpetrators...... 44 4.3.1 Antwerp 2006 ...... 44 4.3.2 Brussels 2014 ...... 46 4.3.3 Comparison ...... 48 4.4 Labelling the Act ...... 48 4.4.1 Antwerp 2006 ...... 48 4.4.2 Brussels 2014 ...... 49 4.4.3 Comparison ...... 51 4.5 Labelling the Targets ...... 51 4.5.1 Antwerp 2006 ...... 52 4.5.2 Brussels 2014 ...... 52 4.5.3 Comparison ...... 52 4.6 Reactions after the events ...... 53 4.6.1 Antwerp 2006 ...... 53
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4.6.2 Brussels 2014 ...... 55 5. CONCLUSION ...... 57 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 61 7. APPENDIX ...... 71
X. LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CCC: Cellules Communistes Combattantes
DS: De Standaard (Newspaper)
FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation
KLA: Kosovo Liberation Army
NATO: North Atlantic Treaty Organization
USA: United States of America
U.S.: United States
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1. INTRODUCTION “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.
After the attacks on 11 September 2001, former president of the United States, George W. Bush, divided the world into two sides: those who stand for freedom, and those who support or harbor terrorism. The United States grabbed with pleasure the role of leading force within the ‘world of freedom’ and succeeded in creating a huge NATO-coalition for the nation’s “War on
Terror”.
Since this infamous quote, words like ‘terrorism’, ‘terror’, and ‘terror-group’ are omnipresent in contemporary media and politics. More than ever, we are being confronted with these words on our radio’s, our television screens, and our social media. Attacks from organisations like
Daesh, Boko Haram, or Al-Shabaab are weekly news subjects. On the G7 summit from June
2015 in Germany, the fight against terrorism was one of the most important points on the agenda. The stance against terrorism seemed unanimous:
“The scourge of terrorism has affected countless innocent victims. It denies tolerance,
the enjoyment of universal human rights and fundamental freedoms, including religious
freedom, destroys cultural heritage and uproots millions of people from their homes. In
light of the Foreign Terrorist Fighters phenomenon, the fight against terrorism and
violent extremism will have to remain the priority for the whole international
community.”1
The border between ‘freedom’ and ‘terror’ seems easy to draw, but is that really the case? If we may believe the American linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, George Bush will have to start with taking on his own country when he declares a “War on Terror”. Chomsky called the
1 G7, “Leaders’ Declaration G7-Summit” In
United States the “world’s leading terrorist state”: her historical campaigns in Cuba, Angola, and Nicaragua, and the current drone operations in Pakistan are according to him part of “the world’s biggest terrorist campaign”.2
Although there exists a certain unanimity that terrorism is something evil and must be fought against, it seems like this unanimity does not really exist when one has to determine who or what is a terrorist. Could we say terrorism is a ‘neutral’ and independent phenomenon and that it should be objectively possible to define who or what is a terrorist? Which criteria are then being used to define who or what is a terrorist? This thesis will demonstrate the difficulties that rise when one wants to define a terrorist and terrorism, and will discuss the relativity and complexity of this phenomenon.
The main goal of this research is to connect the theoretical problems that rise while trying to define terrorism to the everyday usage of this concept. Since terrorism has become a very ‘hot’ and much used concept in the contemporary mass media, it is not only interesting but also relevant and useful to analyse the usage of this concept within the mass media. Because of its relevance, analysing the usage of the word terrorism within mass media has been fairly popular in recent decades, especially in the United States. However, in Belgium, and more specifically
Flanders, there is still room for the improvement of our knowledge on the media usage of the words terrorist and terrorism. This thesis therefore consists of a comparison of the Flemish media coverage of two similar violent incidents that happened in Belgium during the last ten years. The first incident occurred on 11 May 2006. On this day, the young, white Belgian Hans
Van Themsche shot three people in the centre of Antwerp, killing two and severely injuring one person. The second incident occurred eight years later, on 24 May 2014. On this day, the
French-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche shot and killed four people in the Jewish Museum in
2 Press TV, “Chomsky says US is world’s leading terrorist state” In:
Brussels. By comparing the media coverage -of the Flemish television news and two Flemish newspapers- the ultimate goal is to answer the following research question: “How does the
Flemish media label the perpetrators, actions and victims of two similar violent incidents but with perpetrators from a completely different background?”.
Media channels are often accused of not being consistent enough in the usage of concepts like
‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorism’. This thesis wants to test if such accusations could also be applied on the Flemish media. More than just analysing the labelling of both incidents by the media, this research also intends to analyse the public debate that emerged after both shootings. How did politicians, intellectuals but also ordinary people react to the events in Antwerp and Brussels?
What was the main discourse that appeared in the media after the shootings? Eventually, the purpose is to consider how the incidents were being framed and reported during the first three weeks since they happened.
The thesis is divided into five chapters, whom this introduction is the first. After a theoretical and conceptual second chapter that will focus on the defining of terrorism and the relation between terrorism and the media, it will continue with an explanation of the methodology in the third chapter. The fourth chapter ultimately represents the results of the research. It is important to notice that the findings in chapter four are supported by a series of graphs added in the appendix. Chapter five is the general conclusion in which the final thoughts on the research results will be discussed.
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2. THEORY: TERRORISM AND THE MEDIA. It is hard to neglect the contemporary omnipresence of terrorism. Before 9/11 terrorism was a rather minor concern of public policy, and in academia only a few select scholars devoted to its study. However, since the attacks of 11 September 2001, the amount of publications on this topic exploded. From that infamous day onwards, we live in a “terrorism-saturated world”.3
Ever since researchers have investigated the causes, the fight against it, and the various forms it can take. Unfortunately there is only a rather small amount of publications that investigates terrorism from a historical perspective, which is incomprehensible because the contemporary problems that the world faces can only be understood by paying attention at the historical context.
2.1 Tracing the ‘origins’ of Terrorism Analysing the existing literature of authors that did decide to pay attention to the historical context of terrorism, teaches us that there is no such thing as ‘the origins of terrorism’. A consensus on how far one has to go back to find the first acts of terrorism does not exist. Some scholars, like Randall Law, Walter Laqueur, Gérard Chaliand, Arnaud Blin and Gus Martin go back as far as to antiquity to trace the first ‘terrorists’. The American historian Randall Law argues that terrorism is “as old as human civilization, and as new as this morning’s headlines”.4
Law’s history of terrorism starts with the reign of the brutal Ashurnasirpal II, who was the leader of the Assyrian empire and allegedly ‘terrorized’ his people from 883 to 859 BC.5
Afterwards he continues his historical overview with examples from ‘terror’ in ancient Rome and ancient Greece. The American historian Walter Laqueur, who can be considered as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the study of terrorism, mentions a group known as the Sicarii as one of the oldest terrorist organizations. This Palestine based group strongly opposed the Roman
3 Richard Jackson and Samuel Sinclair, Contemporary Debates on Terrorism. (New York: Routledge, 2012) 27. 4 Randall Law, Terrorism. A History. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009) 1. 5 Ibid., 11. 7 occupation of Judea and tried to make that clear by burning granaries and sabotaging
Jerusalem’s water supplies.6
Probably the most commonly used example of pre-modern terrorism is the case of the medieval
Assassins in Syria. The rise of this notorious Islamic faction was a direct consequence of the many schisms in Islam.7 The Assassins were originally based in Persia but spread to the neighboring Syria. Because the size of their group remained fairly limited and they thus could not wage an open war, they unleashed a campaign of ‘terror’ killing governors, caliphs, and even the crusader king of Jerusalem: Conrad de Monferrat.8 Law, quite affirmatively and almost teleological, states that in many ways the Assassins “appear to be the forerunners of today’s jihadis”.9
Although some scholars thus argue that the first examples of terrorism can be found in the ancient civilizations, it is more or less accepted that the words ‘terrorism’ and ‘terror’ were not consistently used before the French Revolution. The French historians Gérard Chaliand and
Arnaud Blin call the period starting from 1789 the “invention of modern terror”.10 The period immediately after the beginning of the French revolution was characterized by the so called
“régime de la terreur” under the leadership of Robbespierre. During this violent period thousands of people that were considered enemies of the revolution were executed. The word
‘terror’ in this period thus became strongly associated with Robespierre’s brutal regime, and more extensively with the abuse of office and power.11 This association definitely differs from the contemporary one. The American political analyst and terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman
6 Walter Laqueur, A History of Terrorism. (New Jersey: Little Brown & Co, 1977) 8. 7 Randall Law, op. cit., 39. 8 Walter Laqueur, ibid., 8. 9 Randall Law, op. cit., 40. 10 Gérard Chaliand, and Arnaud Blin, A History of Terrorism. From Antiquity to Al Qaeda. (London: University of California Press, 2007), v. 11 Walter Laqueur, op. cit., 7 ; Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006) 3. 8 however, sees two comparisons between the reign of terror and contemporary terrorism, namely that it is meant to change society and politics and that it is “organized and systematic”.12
After the French Revolution, the word terrorism spread rapidly over Europe, Russia and some other parts of the world. More or less three quarters of a century after its ‘birth’ during the
French Revolution, the meaning of terrorism changed. More and more it received the revolutionary and anti-state connotation that it still has today.13 Hofmann argues that this shift in meaning was a result of the emergence of a new socio-economic context with the advent of the industrial revolution and the rise of socialism and Marxism.14 But besides socialism and
Marxism, it were mainly anarchism and nationalism that gave new impulses to the meaning of terrorism. It is in this period, the mid -and late nineteenth century, that most historians begin their history, or at least modern history, of terrorism. The British historian Michael Burleigh for example argues that he “could venture back to the medieval Syrian Assassins, but does not regard them as helpful in understanding contemporary terrorism.”15 Burleigh therefore begins his Cultural History of Terrorism with the story of the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish Republican nationalist organization. Also Laqueur admits that, although he goes back to antiquity (cfr. supra), systematic terrorism only began in the mid-nineteenth century.16
Starting from this period, most histories of terrorism more or less follow the same chronology and use the same divisions of different ‘eras of terrorism’. The mid –and late nineteenth century period came to be known as the era of anarchist terrorism, although some authors also brand this as a period of nationalist terrorism. It was probably the Russian organization Narodnaya
12 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 3. ; Recent examples however, show that it could be questioned whether terrorism really is as organized and systematic as Hoffman argues. 13 Paul Wilkinson, “Is Terrorism still a Useful Analytical Term or should it be Abandoned? Yes.”. in: Richard Jackson and Samuel Sinclair, Contemporary Debates on Terrorism. (New York: Routledge, 2012) 43. 14 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., pg. 5. 15 Michael Burleigh, A Cultural History of Terrorism. (London: Harperpress, 2008) ix. 16 Walter Laqueur, op. cit., 11. 9
Volya17 that put the anarchist dictum “propaganda by the deed” into practice for the first time.
This group killed individuals whom they considered the embodiment of the autocratic, tsarist regime. They immortalized themselves by killing tsar Alexander II in 1881, a deed which inevitably also led to their demise due to the fierce repression they had to undergo afterwards.18
After the anarchist era, some authors chose to include the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan in their historical overview of terrorism. All of them agree however on the period between the late nineteenth century until the beginning of World War 1. This era is known as the dawn of ethno- nationalist terrorism, more specifically in Ireland, the Balkan, and Armenia. Out of all nationalist ‘terror attacks’ during this period, the one conducted by Gavrilo Princip on Archduke
Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary (cfr. infra) is by far the most infamous since it unleashed a world war. The chronology then continues with an era of ‘state terror’ in the 1930’s. Although the word terrorism was still being used to depict non-state actors, the word ‘terror’ became associated with the fierce practices of dictatorships like the Nazi and Soviet regimes.19
The period after the Second World War is seen in the historical literature as the era of anti- colonial terrorism in Africa and Asia, at least in the Western narrative. During the late 1960’s and 70’s these revolutionaries were again joined by ethno-nationalist groups outside a colonial or neo-colonial framework and various leftist, Marxist, and Leninist organizations.20 Good examples from this period are groups like Yasser Arafat’s PLO and the Basque ETA. In the
1980’s terrorism kept its revolutionary and ethno-nationalist undertone but it became - according to Western historians- more and more associated with a calculated means to destabilize the West, orchestrated by the Soviet Union.21 In Belgium, the Cellules Communistes
Combattantes or CCC caused consternation and a fear-psychosis after bombing and sabotaging
17 Translated this means “People’s Will”. 18 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 5-6. 19 Ibid., 15. 20 Ibid., 16. 21 Ibid., 16-17. 10 several ‘Western’ companies and NATO infrastructure during the period between 1983 and
1986.22 During the nineties, the concept of ‘narco-terrorism’ popped up, as it was believed in the West that illegal drug trafficking was used to advance the objectives of governments such as those in Bulgaria or Cuba.23
The shocking and almost iconic attacks on the eleventh of September 2001 inevitably redefined terrorism yet again.24 Although already some Islamic orientated organizations committed
‘terrorist’ attacks in the pre-9/11 era, it was only since this date that terrorism almost exclusively became associated with radical Islam. Historians thus branded this post-9/11 era up until today as the era of Islamic terrorism, without neglecting its pre-9/11 roots. In Chaliand’s and Blin’s history of terrorism, almost the whole post 1968 period is dedicated to radical Islam, Islamic terrorism, and most of all the icons of this radical movement: Al Qaeda.25 All other histories of terrorism -if written in the post 9/11 era- dedicate at least one chapter to “the rise of jihadist terrorism”26, “l’obmbre chaud de l’islam”27 or “Islamist terrorism”.28
Reading the various ‘histories of terrorism’ exposes two things. First of all there seems to be a majority of scholars who agree that the modern era of terrorism as we know it today began somewhere in the mid-nineteenth century. From that period onwards, most authors follow more or less the same, sometimes even teleological, chronology. Secondly it shows that, during the course of history, the words terrorism and terror did not always have the same meaning and have been associated with a big variety of phenomena. The latter causes the rising of an important question: does a clear definition of terrorism actually exist?
22 Katrien Temmerman, Terreurbestrijding in België en Europa. De interactie tussen inlichtingendiensten, politie en justitie. (Antwerpen: Maklu, 2007), 19. 23 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 18. 24 Ibid., 19. 25 Gérard Chaliand and Arnaud Blin, op. cit., 221-419. 26 Randall Law, op. cit., table of contents. 27 Gilles Ferragu, Histoire Du Terrorisme. (Paris: Perrin, 2004), table of contents. 28 Michael Burleigh, op. cit., table of contents. 11
2.2 Defining Terrorism: The Impossible Task? The explosion of literature since the attacks of 9/11 created a vast amount of debates on terrorism within the academic world. In Contemporary Debates on Terrorism for example, university scholars Samuel Sinclair and Richard Jackson bundle some glaring questions that are topical within contemporary terrorism studies: they discuss categories of terrorism, the causes of terrorism, how to deal with terrorism, etc.29 It is, however, pointless to debate all of this without having a clear understanding of what terrorism actually means. That is why Jackson and Sinclair choose to begin their book with the most important and heavily discussed debate: defining terrorism.
It is a fact that there is still no academic consensus on the definition of terrorism. The main problem with the recent rise of literature on terrorism is that hundreds of authors and scholars have proposed various different definitions of terrorism. When one scholar mentions terrorism, this could thus mean that he is not using the same parameters as another scholar. Gilles Ferragu, a French historian who wrote a brilliant and up to date history of terrorism, calls it “an undefinable crime”.30 He even claims that even if there would be academic unanimity, some would still reject that definition because of ideological reasons. 31
Not only within the academic world, but also on the political level a consensus has still not been reached. The United Nations have upon this day still not succeeded to reach a consensus on the definition of terrorism. Several propositions have yet been pushed forward, but those have never been accepted unanimously. The lack of international agreement has negative consequences on the fight against terrorism, because now each nation uses its own criteria to define what terrorism is. In other words: a terrorist according to the USA might not be a terrorist according to Russia. Even within the United States, the FBI, the US Department of Homeland Security,
29 Richard Jackson and Samuel Sinclair, Contemporary Debates on Terrorism. (New York: Routledge, 2012). 30 Gilles Ferragu, Histoire du Terrorisme (Paris: Perrin, 2014) Kindle location 125-126. 31 Gilles Ferragu, Histoire du Terrorisme (Paris: Perrin, 2014) Kindle location 131-133. 12 and the US department of Defence all use different definitions of terrorism.32 Terrorism is a potential threat to everyone but divides the international community. The various criteria and definitions cross and entwine each other, and sometimes even lead to diplomatic conflicts.
Ferragu calls this lack of international agreement “the first big victory of terrorism” since international division can impossibly lead to international cooperation against terrorism.33
Although there is still no agreement, several attempts have already been made in the past to establish an internationally accepted definition of terrorism. After disastrous incidents such as the attacks on 9/11 or various highjacks in the seventies, a more compelling demand for a universally accepted definition grew. 34 The very first attempt was done by the League of
Nations in 1937, but was only accepted by 24 countries. 35
The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research -a bible for terrorism researchers- attempts to assemble the huge amount of literature on terrorism in order to shape an image of the contemporary debates and theories of terrorism. On the basis of this book, it is more or less possible to ban several misconceptions about terrorism. According to Alex P. Schmid, author of this self-proclaimed handbook and one of the great experts in terrorism studies, the biggest problem is the use of definitions that are too broad. The broader the definition, the more people will use the same term while they are actually speaking about different phenomena. Very common according to Schmid is for example the confusion of terrorism with political violence.
Terrorism is actually a subcategory of political violence and not the other way around.36
Hoffman argues that the media is to blame for the latter, since they would describe a too wide range of violent acts as ‘terrorism’.37
32 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 30. 33 Gilles Ferragu, Histoire du Terrorisme (Paris: Perrin, 2014) Kindle location 169-170. 34 Gilles Ferragu, Histoire du Terrorisme (Paris: Perrin, 2014) Kindle location 145. 35 Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011) 50. 36 Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011) 5. 37 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 1. 13
The common consensus about the meaning of terrorism is that it is a method, an activity, or a tactic with the purpose to produce ‘terror’. Groups or individuals use this tactic to invigorate certain political or ideological convictions. Terror is a state of mind, characterized by an intense fear of a threatening danger. The purpose of the terrorists can be to intimidate a couple of individuals or to frighten a whole society. More or less every researcher agrees on this basis theory of terrorism, but beyond this fundament lie various problems.38
The contemporary public opinion often sees terrorists as small organizations or ‘lone wolves’, executing deadly attacks. But what about the violence of nation states? As mentioned above, the 1930’s are traditionally considered as the era of state terror in totalitarian states like the
Soviet-Union or Nazi-Germany. What about the murders on political personalities like Martin
Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, or Archduke Franz Ferdinand? If the ultimate goal of terrorism is to create chaos, destabilization and in the end change, then this last example is more than ever a form of terrorism.39 However, a fair amount of researchers argue for a strict separation between ‘assassinations’ and ‘terrorism’, because one can just have the purpose to get rid of an individual without having terrorist motives.40 Should the victims of terrorism always be
‘innocent’ civilians? What about attacks on material property, could this also be considered as terrorism? If we would include this, then we could consider the Boston Tea Party of 1773 as an act of terrorism. Schmid argues that this inclusion is too risky because then random acts of vandalism or sabotage could be considered as terrorism.41 Norris on the other hand argues that also sabotage could possibly be viewed as a form of terrorism.42 And finally: can organizations carry out terrorist attacks during an ‘official’ war? These are only a small fraction of subjects
38 Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011) 3. 39 Gilles Ferragu, Histoire du Terrorisme (Paris: Perrin, 2014) Kindle location 2061-2062. 40 Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011) 62. 41 Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011) 71. 42 Pippa Norris, Montague Kern and Marion Just (eds.), Framing Terrorism. (New York: Routledge, 2003) 3. 14 that are being debated in the study of terrorism but they already demonstrate that the defining and determining of terrorism is very complex and difficult, since there are so many ‘grey areas’.
Because of these difficulties, some scholars gave up on trying to define terrorism. Walter
Laqueur for example, despaired of defining the concept, arguing that it is neither possible to do so nor fruitful to make the attempt.43 Dominic Bryan, who is a political anthropologist at the
Queen’s University of Belfast, goes as far as to argue that the concept of terrorism is too simplistic and compromised to be of real use in the study of political violence.44 He thus claims that ‘terrorism’ is not a useful analytical term and should be abandoned. The Belgian Marxist historian Julien Dohet tries to solve the definitional problem by proposing a “minimal” definition, which defines terrorists as non-state actors, and a “maximal” definition which includes state terror.45
However, most of the scholars who are active in the study of terrorism, actually try to formulate their own definition. Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Advisory Board of the Centre for the
Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the Saint Andrews University in Scotland, refutes
Bryan’s argument by stating that there is a sufficient amount of consensus on the term and it can thus clearly be distinguished from other forms of political violence. According to him, the potential for misuse does not automatically disqualify it from being used.46 Also Bruce
Hofmann has a more ‘positive’ approach towards the defining of terrorism. He argues that the least we can do is distinguish terrorism from other forms of political violence like for example guerrilla.47 Other experts in the field like Brian Jenkins, who is the Senior Adviser to the
President of the RAND corporation, David Whittaker, Ted Gurr, Alex Schmid, Beatrice De
43 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 33. 44 Richard Jackson and Samuel Sinclair, Contemporary Debates on Terrorism. (New York: Routledge, 2012) 30- 31. 45 Julien Dohet, “Terrorisme ou Terrorismes”. In: Espace de Libertés. 2005, afl. 328, 11. 46 Richard Jackson and Samuel Sinclair, op. cit., 30. 47 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 34. 15
Graaf, Rik Coolsaet, and many more, all proposed their own definition. Moreover, besides the academic terrorist experts, hundreds of politicians, journalists, political commentators, institutions, etc. attempted to define terrorism.48
Despite the existence of various different definitions, there is one point on which everyone agrees, namely that terrorism has a strongly negative connotation. This has not always been the case. In the late nineteenth century for example, the connotation was definitely not as bad as today. The above mentioned Narodnaya Volya for example did not care to brand themselves terrorists. Recent and contemporary organizations on the other hand, strongly prefer to name themselves freedom, liberation, or self-defence movements.49 Today’s most infamous
‘terrorists’, Islamic State, however does not seem to care at all to be called a terrorist organization. In their propaganda videos or in their self-made nasheeds they openly call to
‘terrorize’ their enemies.50 Could this be the beginning of a revaluation of the word ‘terrorist’ among alleged terrorist organizations? Time will tell.
The consequence of this multiplicity of definitions, the lack of consensus and the many ‘grey areas’ is obviously problematic. Academic and political disagreement inevitably results in politicians, media, or other powerful forces using their own criteria to define who or what is a terrorist. Hence the decision to call someone a terrorist becomes almost unavoidably subjective.51 Since everyone agrees that terrorism has a strong negative connotation, this word will always be used to depict the enemy, or as Ferragu describes it: “le terrorisme est l’ennemi, un adversaire à qui l’on dénie toute légitimité.52 Since governments have the opportunity to do this, they also have the opportunity to legitimize the existence and actions of themselves and
48 Icons like for example Noam Chomsky, Christopher Hitchens or Benjamin Netanyahu have all tried to define the concept. 49 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 20-21. 50 A nasheed is an Islamic chant that are most of the time sung acapella. IS has released some of their own nasheeds in which they thus call to terrorize the kuffars. 51 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 23. 52 Gilles Ferragu, op. cit., Kindle locatie 6823-6824. 16 delegitimize the actions and existence of their enemies. Israel and Palestine for example, both use the word terrorism to depict each other and delegitimize each other’s actions. After the massacre in Munich during the Olympic Games of 1972, Western countries in the UN argued that the Palestinian perpetrators were terrorists. However, many Arab and African nations claimed that the attackers should not be depicted as terrorists but that the attacks should rather be contextualized within a ‘liberation struggle’ due to the ‘illegal occupation’ of Palestine.53 It is tempting to apply the unfortunately much used cliché “one’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter” on this case. It has to be stressed however that terrorism is a violent method or tactic and ‘resistance’ or ‘freedom-fighting’ is the legitimation of certain violence.54 This quote is thus inherently wrong. Someone can perfectly fight for ‘freedom’ while deploying terrorist tactics. Despite this cliché being theoretically meaningless, it has an important influence in practice. The latter can be illustrated with the case of the Kosovar KLA.
The Kosovo Liberation Army or Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës was a violent Kosovan-Albanian ethno-nationalist organisation that was active during the 1990’s. The creation of the KLA was a consequence of the Serbian nationalist policies that were conducted in Yugoslavia since the infamous Serbian president Slobodan Milošević in 1989 decided to make an end to the relatively great amount of autonomy that Kosovo had been enjoying for a long period of time.
During the reign of Milošević, an increasing number of Albanian-Kosovars55 became frustrated as socio-economic conditions deteriorated, human rights conditions worsened, and the prospect of realising their political objectives through peaceful means dimmed.56 In 1996, the radical
KLA left their first big impression by carrying out various attacks on Serbian refugees from
Croatia, Serbian police stations, etc. and thereby declared the beginning of their guerrilla war
53 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 24. 54 Alex P. Schmid, The Routledge Handbook of Terrorism Research (New York: Routledge, 2011) 20. 55 The ethnic Albanians are the great majority of the population in Kosovo. 56 David L. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo (London: The MIT Press, 2012) 67. ; Part of the cause was that Kosovo’s wish for independence was neglected at the Dayton peace agreement of 1995, the agreement which made an end to the Bosnian war. 17 against what they called “Serbian oppression”.57 The rising tensions inevitably worried the international community.
When on 8 January 1998 the KLA claimed responsibility for several attacks in Kosovo and
Macedonia, and Serbian units eliminated one Albanian in a reaction to the attacks, the USA decided time had come to intensify the dialogues in order to maintain peace in the region. Robert
S. Gelbard was chosen as envoy of the United States and Special Representative of the President in the Balkan region. In February 1998 he travelled to Belgrade for a meeting with Milošević and informed the world in the subsequent press conference about the American point of view on the Kosovo-question: “We condemn very strongly terrorist actions in Kosovo. The KLA is, without any question, a terrorist group.”58 Also, he rejected any possible changes concerning the internationally recognized borders within Yugoslavia. Although everyone agrees that
Gelbard really depicted the KLA as a terrorist organization, researchers can’t seem to find an agreement whether or not this was also the official stance of the United States. According to
David Phillips for example, Gelbard “slipped” and took the State Department by surprise when he called the KLA a terrorist organization.59 Reveron and Stevenson on the other hand, are convinced that the KLA was part of the America’s “list of terrorist organizations”.60 Anyway, the damage was done.61 Public opinion saw the Americans as anti-KLA and Milošević received his legitimation to attack Kosovo.
The branding of the KLA as a terrorist group, without equally condemning Serbian policies, indirectly meant the American support to Miloševićs policies.62 However, that was how the
57 David L. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo (London: The MIT Press, 2012) 68. 58 Wolfgang Petritsch and Robert Pichler, Kosovo-Kosova. Der lange Weg zum Frieden (Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2005) 135. 59 David L. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo (London: The MIT Press, 2012) 87. 60 Dereck Reveron and Jeffrey Stevenson, Flashpoints in the War on Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2006) 68. 61 David L. Phillips, Liberating Kosovo (London: The MIT Press, 2012) 87. 62 Wolfgang Petritsch and Robert Pichler, Kosovo-Kosova. Der lange Weg zum Frieden (Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2005) 135. 18
Serbian president interpreted Gelbard’s words. For Milošević, this meant that the Americans had given him a free passage to militarily take on Kosovo and the KLA, in the name of a ‘War on Terrorism’. Few days after the statements of Gelbard the Serbs took action. Armed with tanks, heavy artillery, helicopters, and machine guns, the Serbian military launched a big offensive against villages and KLA-hubs in the region of the Drenica valley.63 This marked the
‘official’ beginning of the Kosovo War.
The Serbian offensive was fierce. Not only KLA-members were victims of the attacks, but also the civilian population suffered because of the Serbian violence. Serbian brutality and stories of ethnic cleansing made the amount of KLA-members swell. Whereas they had ca. 500 members in the beginning of 1998, by the beginning of 1999 the organization counted at least
12000 members.64 The West could not watch and do nothing.
The Serbian war crimes and growing popularity of the KLA directed the USA and with it a
NATO-coalition towards openly supporting and even supplying the KLA, whose reputation more and more changed from a terrorist organization to a legitimate resistance force. Even
France, a historical ally of Serbia, decided to remove the KLA from its terror-list after strong lobbying of the United Kingdom and the USA.65 NATO ended up being the more useful ally, as in 1999 it eventually chose to start a military intervention campaign in Yugoslavia while backing the KLA. After the infamous NATO bombing campaign of 1999 Milošević finally withdrew in June of that year. The KLA was ‘victorious’.
The KLA-case clearly shows how the lack of consensus on a definition and many of what I have named ‘grey areas’ result in a carte blanche for politicians and governments to choose
63 Wolfgang Petritsch and Robert Pichler, Kosovo-Kosova. Der lange Weg zum Frieden (Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 2005) 135. 64 Dereck Reveron and Jeffrey Stevenson, Flashpoints in the War on Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2006) 68. 65 Dereck Reveron and Jeffrey Stevenson, Flashpoints in the War on Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2006) 82. 19 who is a terrorist, and who is not. Serbia used ‘a war on terror’ to justify their brutal offensive in Kosovo. The USA, based on the statements of special convoy Gelbard, and France originally defined the KLA as a terrorist organization, but when Milošević made himself more and more persona non grata they reversed their stance against the organization. It is striking that not a change in the nature of the KLA-attacks -the organization kept on using the same guerrilla tactics during the whole war- caused this reversed stance, but a change in NATO-policy did.
NATO promoted the KLA from a terrorist organization to a group of ‘freedom fighters’.
2.3 The Role of the Media: Framing. The same arbitrariness concerning the usage of the word terrorism also applies to the media.
Some American media for example seem to have a tendency to brand political or ideological violence from subversive and ‘non-Western’ individuals or organisations as terrorist. Dylann
Roof was the perpetrator of a “racist shooting” in Charleston where he killed nine Afro-
Americans on the 17th of June 2015. Siyed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, two Muslims that killed 14 people in the San Bernardino shootings on the 2nd of December 2015, were the perpetrators of a “terror attack”. Hence it does not seem a coincidence that the Republican nominee and potential president of the United States Donald Trump constantly refers to the San
Bernardino attack to stress the threat of radical Islam but remains silent about the shootings in
Charleston.
Maybe even more striking is the coverage given by the Washington Post and The New York
Times on the Beslan school hostage crisis in September 2004. During this massacre in a Russian
School in the region of North-Ossetia, at least 331 hostages, including many children, were killed by ruthless Chechen hostage-takers. Despite the horror and revulsion that this deliberate targeting of children evoked, the two American newspapers mentioned above reported this massacre in a quite neutral and anodyne manner. The words ‘terrorism’ or ‘terror’ were not used in the first stages of the reporting, except in the context of quotations and statements made
20 by various Russian official spokespersons. The newspapers’ reluctance to use the term
‘terrorism’ provoked a lot of critique from several readers.66 One can only guess how the
American newspapers would have reported this tragedy when it would have occurred on
American soil and not in Russia.
Probably one of the best studies ever on the American media broadcasting of ‘terrorist’ attacks is Elite Ambiguity: Framing the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City Bombings by
American researcher Paul Fucito. This comparative study of the media reporting of the bombings of 1993 in the World Trade Center and the similar bombings in 1995 in Oklahoma
City attacks was designed to test the accusation that the American media tend to externalize threats of terrorism.67 Fucito aspired to answer the question how the Americans, particularly
Caucasians, are labelled when committing terrorist activities in comparison to other international actors. Moreover he investigated how the media defined both attacks: as terrorism or was another label assigned?68 By extensively analyzing evening network newscasts from
ABC, NBC, and CBS, Fucito came to the conclusion that the Muslim perpetrators of the attack in 1993 were more easily branded as terrorists, while the white American citizen Timothy
McVeigh who carried out the attack in 1995 was predominantly named a “bomber” or a
“bombing suspect”.69
This more or less subjective and sometimes even unfair reporting of certain events by the media is known within the academic world but also with the broader public as ‘framing’. Professor of
Media and Public Affairs and of International Affairs at the George Washington University in
66 Bruce Hoffman, op. cit., 30. 67 Paul Fucito, Elite Ambiguity: Framing the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City Bombings. (Washington: George Washington University, 2008) 21. 68 Ibid. 69 Paul Fucito, Elite Ambiguity: Framing the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City Bombings. (Washington: George Washington University, 2008) 4. 21
Washtington D.C., Robert Entman, is one of the most important names in the study field of
‘framing’. Entman was the one who in 1993 first theorized the concept of framing as followed:
“To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient
in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition,
causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item
described”70.
An example of a frame is what Entman calls the “cold war frame”. This frame dominated U.S. news of foreign affairs until the end of the cold war. It highlighted certain foreign events, like for example civil wars, as problems. Afterwards it identified their source, for example communist rebels, offered moral judgments like atheistic aggression, and commended particular solutions, in the form of U.S. support for the other side. Hence frames diagnose, evaluate, and prescribe problems.71 The power of framing is that it can, if done well, lead to people accepting one meaning over another. 72 The media can choose which news topic has to be considered as ‘important’, but it also has to the power to report that specific topic in a coloured way.
Whenever dramatic events such as hijackings, plane crashes, bombings or shootings –whether terrorism or not- we rely on the mass media to report these events to the public. According to
Pippa Norris, lecturer at Harvard University, the role of the media is central for the impact of these events upon the general public. After all, journalists have a role as “facilitators” in the sense that without their decision to give publicity -in the form of front-page headlines or news reports on live television- to certain events, some violent organizations like terrorist groups
70 Robert Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm” in: Journal of Communication, 1993, 52. 71 Ibid., 52. 72 Paul Fucito, op. cit., 10. 22 would fail their objectives, namely getting publicity.73 What is more important however, is that the media can choose which frame they are going to apply on a certain event. It has to be stressed that, in many cases, the constructing of a frame happens subconsciously. But media thus have the choice to use a terrorism frame to report a hostage in Russia, a knife attack in
Israel, or attacks of communist rebels. Norris interestingly states that “without knowing much, if anything, about the particular people, groups, issues, or even places involved, the terrorist and anti-terrorist frame allows us to quickly sort out, interpret, categorize, and evaluate these conflicts”.74 Hence, when certain events are being framed as ‘terrorist’ events, the information- absorbing public ‘knows’ or ‘feels’ how these events should be interpreted within a particular community. Norris remarks that in ‘obvious’, one sided cases, the conventional news frame is likely to be so strong that few voices from within the own community will offer alternative perspectives.75 In two-sided cases however, like for example the conflict between Catholics and
Protestants in Belfast or Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem, a debate over ‘how to frame’ these cases will more likely be conducted.76
Hence, media shapes people’s thoughts and is most people’s primary source of information to events that happen around the world. Without the necessary media coverage, we are unaware that certain events that we did not experience or witnessed happened. Contemporary terrorists are also aware of this. Dutch historian Henri Beunders demonstrates this by giving the example of the above mentioned Timothy McVeigh, who wanted to have his revenge on the American government. However, he did not really express any political demands but what he did want to achieve was a ‘celebrity status’.77 Mass media and terrorism combined allowed him to reach
73 Pippa Norris, Montague Kern and Marion Just (eds.), Framing Terrorism. (New York: Routledge, 2003) 5. 74 Ibid., pg. 6. 75 Ibid., pg. 7. 76 Ibid., pg. 7. 77 Henri Beunders, “Media en Terrorisme”, in: Muller, E., et. al., Terrorisme. Studies over terrorisme en terrorismebestrijding. (Deventer: Kluwer, 2008) 376. 23 this celebrity status. Also the infamous Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher was very aware of this.
She called publicity “the oxygen of terrorists” and hence reinforced her control over the media by basically censoring them.78 Terrorists from IS for example know that the mass media will report their acts if they strike in Paris or Brussels. Hence contemporary terrorism and mass media -in se two totally different phenomena- are completely entwined with each other. Some go as far as to state that the media is actually an ‘ally’ of terrorists. Beunders nuances this statement by pointing out that media indeed play an important role in the considerations of terrorists but that those are not the only channels that they use to make a clear point. Moreover, media can create more ‘understanding’ for the terrorists’ cause but also -and this mostly happens when terrorist attacks occur in the West- more aversion.79
This contemporary and very important connection between media and terrorism manifests itself in the many studies on media coverage of terrorist events that have been done in recent years.
Very popular has been the representation of terrorist attacks in the media, more specifically the labelling of the events itself but also the labelling of the perpetrators, the time spent on its coverage, etc. Some studies have already been mentioned. Another typical example of such a study is Developing terrorism coverage: variances in news framing of the January 2015 attacks in Paris and Borno. In this article, Eric Nevalsky compared the news coverage in American media of two different terrorist attacks that happened in July 2015 in France and Nigeria. His analysis revealed –not surprisingly- significant differences in the coverage of both events: the
Paris attacks were covered more extensively and contained language that highlighted the importance of the topic.80 Also Framing terrorism: geography-based media coverage variations of the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and the 2009 twin suicide car
78 Ibid., 376. 79 Ibid., 389. 80 Eric Nevalsky, “Developing terrorism coverage: variances in news framing of the January 2015 attacks in Paris and Borno” in: Critical Studies on Terrorism, (vol. 8, nr. 3, 2015) 473. 24 bombings in Baghdad by Sarah May Patrick is one of the typical studies. She concluded that
“news frame analysis reveals that coverage of an attack on a Western nation – Spain – compared to one on an Eastern nation – Iraq – contributes to Islamophobia and exacerbates an us against them mentality”.81
The literature on the media coverage and framing of ‘terrorist’ or similar events is massive. A rather large proportion of this is however conducted by Americans on events that happened in the United States.82 As above mentioned studies already demonstrated, also within Europe this kind of research has been conducted. However, when we look at Belgium and more specifically
Flanders there is still space for improvement. Therefore, this research makes an effort to fill up these empty spaces. Why and how this will happen will be explained in the next chapter.
Not only for academics and their students the study of media-framing has been a ‘hot topic’, but also the general public has become more and more aware of framing, media subjectivity, and media dishonesty. Donald Trump for example, constantly refers to what he calls “the dishonest media” in order to frame himself as a victim of subjective news reporting. Another recent example of how framing-awareness has become more and more present in our society was the protest of a couple of hundred Belgian football fans, or “casuals” as they call themselves, on the 27th of March 2016 in Brussels. During this protest, several days after the attacks in Brussels Airport and the Brussels metro, football fans from different clubs in Belgium marched from the Brussels North station to the Beursplein in the centre of the city, while singing anti-Daesh and Belgian nationalist chants. Several minutes after their arrival at the Beursplein they were booed by a part of the crowd that did not appreciate the arrival of what they called
81 Sarah May Patrick, “Framing terrorism: geography-based media coverage variations of the 2004 commuter train bombings in Madrid and the 2009 twin suicide car bombings in Baghdad”, in: Critical Studies on Terrorism, (vol. 7, nr. 3, 2014) 479. 82 Think for example about the above mentioned work of Paul Fucito. 25
‘fascists’. After some fierce discussions and even some violence in the form of pushing, pulling, and punching, between the football fans and some alleged ‘left-wing activists’ in the crowd, the police decided to drive the football fans back to the North station. When this happened, the
‘hooligans’ began throwing stones and other material to the police. After some clashes and arrests, the police managed to successfully drive the fans back to the original starting place of their march.
Following these events, various national and international media reported that ‘hooligans’,
‘extreme right wing militants’, and even ‘neo-Nazi’s’ had ‘hijacked’ a peaceful memorial for the victims of the attacks in Brussels.83 Some media claimed that several football fans had made
Hitler salutes. The Socialist Mayor from Brussels, Yvan Mayeur, blamed the Belgian interior minister Jan Jambon, member of the Flemish nationalist party, that he had not done anything to stop the march and that the football fans were ‘right wing extremists’ and thus the Flemish nationalists’ electorate. A couple of days after the controversial march however, the ‘casuals’ reacted in an official press statement, saying that they only wanted to give a sign that fans from different Belgian clubs were willing to unite in a march against terrorism and against Islamic
State. They argued that the media misinformed the public about the events, that they were not connected to Flemish right wing extremists since there were Walloons and Belgian-Moroccans among them, and that they were being provoked by ‘left-wing militants’ which ultimately led to the violence. They deplored the fact that they, unwillingly, ended up in the middle of a political controversy.84 On social media, people widely discussed the events, with one group
83 Julian Robinson, “Riot police use water cannon on the streets of Brussels: 'Peace' march organised in wake of terror attacks is hijacked by far-right protesters making Nazi salutes” in:
Flanders versus Wallonia. Finally, it also demonstrates that in our contemporary society many people are aware of the concept framing, and hence use it to show that they have been misrepresented in the media.
2.4 Influence of the Media Analysing the content of mass media only matters if this mass media exercises a certain influence. It is indeed widely assumed that it does, why would the concept of censorship otherwise exist?85 Professor John Street gives the example of an American radio station that in
1938 transmitted a report that the Martians had landed. This caused panic and mass confusion among the many listeners and this result seemed to confirm the persuasive power of mass media.86 There is however, an ongoing debate about the effects of media on the public opinion and political behavior. It is for example widely believed that the media had an important influence on the public opinion during the war in Vietnam. However, this view is also widely contested.87
Several scholars warn us not to take the influence from the media for granted. What does
‘influence’ mean? What is it about? Does it influence people’s voting behavior or only their opinion on certain politicians and political topics? Those are some primary and critical questions that need to be asked.88 While some researchers claim that the influence of the press
85 John Street, Mass Media, Politics and Democracy. (New York: Palgrave, 2001) 80. 86 Ibid., 81. 87 John Street, op. cit., 83. 88 Ibid., 85. 27 on voting behavior is limited, others argue that it is big and even decisive. Concerning the influence of newspapers and magazines, there is still an active disagreement between scholars.
On the influence of television however, scholars have almost reached a consensus. Somewhat surprisingly, the overall view seems to be that television is a less potent source of influence, especially when it comes to voting behavior.89 But ‘influence’ does not only evolve around voting behavior, it extends beyond it. Some argue that television shapes viewers’ feelings, the way they respond emotionally to politics. Several experimental research projects show that television network news affect how people judge crime, other ethnicities, poverty, etc.90
News is not only about text. Some studies argue that viewers remember the news better when it has visuals. Moreover, some researchers have pointed out that people will remember visual messages better than verbal messages.91 The images that are remembered best are mostly
‘negative’ images, like for examples images of war or terrorist attacks. According to Renita
Coleman they have a greater effect. People are thought to read more of a certain story and remember it better when it is accompanied by negative images. Visuals are even more important when certain news topics are not part of a reader’s or viewer’s personal experience, like for example international news. Studies have shown that people tend to learn the most about foreign places and people through visual media.92
While some scholars claim media influence is direct, others follow the influential ‘presumed- influence’-theory. This theory was established in 1983 by Columbia University sociologist W.
Philips Davison. It argues that mass media’s biggest influence on society takes place just because people think that media is influential. Parents for example, could be convinced that their children have a high risk to be influenced by certain television programs or cartoons. As
89 Ibid., 87-89. 90 Ibid., 89-93. 91 D’ Angelo, P., et. al., Doing News Framing Analysis. (New York: Routledge, 2010) 242 92 D’ Angelo, P., op. cit. 243-245. 28 a result they buy a television with a V-chip, which allows certain programs to be blocked. This hypothesis claims that people exposed to mass media often believe that it has a greater influence on other people than on themselves. As a consequence, this ‘third-person perception’ leads to action.93
93 Nurit Tal-Or et al., “Testing Causal Direction in the Influence of Presumed Media Influence”. In: Communication Research. (Vol. 37, nr. 6, 2010), 802-803. 29
3. METHODS AND CASE STUDIES 3.1 Relevance of this study For this study, two similar incidents that shocked Belgium in the last ten years have been chosen as the centre of analysis. The first of these incidents was a shooting that happened in Antwerp on the 11th of May 2006 in Antwerp. On this day, the young, white Belgian Hans Van Themsche shot three people in the centre of Antwerp, killing two and severely injuring one person. The second incident occurred eight years later, on the 24th of May 2014. On this day, the French-
Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche shot and killed four people in the Jewish Museum in Brussels.
There are several reasons why a comparison of the media coverage of these events is interesting and important. First of all, both incidents belong to the most shocking and mediatised crimes that have happened in Belgium in the last ten years. Hence, an analysis of the media coverage of these events does contribute to the knowledge of the history of violence, crime, and
‘terrorism’ in Belgium. Secondly a comparison between these similar shootings allows us to investigate the arbitrary use of the word terrorism in the Flemish media. The interesting aspect about this comparison is that both incidents are quite similar but the perpetrators are from completely different backgrounds: Hans Van Themsche is a white, autochthonous Belgian male while Medhi Nemmouche is a French-Algerian Muslim. As explained in the first chapter, the contemporary era is by various historians being labelled as the era of ‘radical Islamic terrorism’, associating terrorism almost exclusively with radical Islam. It is therefore interesting to see how the shootings and perpetrator in Antwerp have been labelled in comparison with the events and perpetrator in Brussels. Studies have already shown that the American media often use different standards when it comes to international actors committing violent crimes on US-territory, compared to autochthonous Americans committing crimes on US-territory. This research can show if this is also the case in Europe, more specifically Flanders. Lastly, it is interesting to analyse the consequences of the media coverage as well, something which is often neglected in media coverage studies. This is, of course, not an easy task and actually requires a separate
30 research including for example survey’s since the causal influence of certain media coverage is difficult to prove. It is however possible to make some hypotheses of how influential the media reporting in these case studies was.
3.2 Sources The results of this research are based on a content analysis of four different Flemish media channels. The chosen channels are firstly the two main television news channels in Flanders:
VRT and VTM. The VRT or Flemish Radio and Television Broadcasting Organization is the national public-service and therefore subsided broadcaster for the Flemish part of Belgium. The
VTM or Flemish Television Company is by far the largest commercial television broadcaster in Flanders. The bulk of the Flemish population that watches the news on television chooses between one of these channels, whereas the success of other Flemish news broadcasts is rather small. Both television stations have a news-department which usually broadcasts live on television at 1pm, 6pm, 7pm and late at night. This study provides the results of the analysis of the 7pm news broadcasts of both VTM and VRT. The time span of the content analysis is 21 days. This means that every 7pm news broadcast of the first 21 days, starting with the day of the shootings, will be analysed. The reasons why the 7pm broadcasts have been chosen are obvious: these broadcasts are the most extensive and have by far the most viewers, compared to the 1pm, 6pm, or late evening broadcasts.
Secondly, this analysis is based on the content of two reputed Flemish newspapers: De
Standaard and De Morgen. DS and DM are not the most read newspapers in Flanders. However, the reason that these newspapers were chosen is not because of their popularity but because they have a certain ‘quality-image’ and because of their alleged ‘ideology’. Both newspapers are in the public opinion considered as ‘quality-newspapers’ with a more ‘intellectual’ core of readers. The ideological origins of both newspapers differ profoundly. DS originated from a catholic background. The beginning of DM on the other hand, has to be contextualized in left-
31 wing, socialist circles.94 The advantage of this selection is that this study cannot be accused of focussing on one side of the ideological spectrum. It has to be said that today, the ideological backgrounds of the newspapers are not that obvious and visible anymore. However, it cannot be stated that it is completely gone. Here also, the newspaper contents of the first 21 days since the day of the shootings will be analysed. Slightly different than with the television coverage is that the newspapers published on the day of the shootings –11 May 2006 and 24 May 2014- are not included in the analysis. This is of course a logical consequence of the fact that the shootings did not yet happen on the moment of publication from these newspapers.
It is possible to consult the 7pm news broadcasts of VRT and VTM news online, thanks to the
‘Elektronisch Nieuwsarchief’ or ‘ENA’ project. This project is the result of a collaboration between the Flemish universities of Leuven and Antwerp. Its purpose is to offer researchers a chance to consult all complete 7pm news broadcasts of VRT and VTM from 2003 until 2015.95
The VRT news broadcasts from the year 2014 are also digitally archived and consultable on the
VRT-news website.96 De Standaard also has its own archive. On the newspaper’s official website, every published newspaper from 2006 up until today is digitally archived and consultable for subscribed readers.97 The articles from De Morgen were consulted on ‘GoPress’, a Belgian press-database that digitalizes millions of articles from Belgian newspapers and magazines.98
I believe that with the two main television news broadcasts and two reputed newspapers of the
Flemish region, the analysis represents a great majority of the media coverage that has reached the Flemish public during the three weeks after both shootings. Also, by opting for newspapers
94 The same remark applies on VTM and VRT. VTM is mostly seen as a more ‘right-wing’ news channel, whereas VRT is known as a ‘left-wing’ environment. 95 ENA, “Project Elektronisch Nieuwsarchief”. In: < http://www.nieuwsarchief.be/index.php?pg=2> , (6/4/2015). 96 The website of VRT-news is http://deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws. 97 De Standaard’s archive can be consulted on http://www.standaard.be/plus/archief. 98 GoPress’ website is http://www.gopress.be/info/nl. 32 that are on different sides of the ‘ideological spectrum’, enough ideological diversity is guaranteed. However, the results remain limited. First of all there are several other Flemish newspapers with a fair amount of readers, like Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad, De Gazet van Antwerpen or Het Belang van Limburg, that are not included in this study because analysing them would simply make this research too extensive. Other television news channels, besides
VRT and VTM-news, are mostly local news channels with very low viewer ratings. It is therefore not interesting and relevant enough to include them in this analysis. Other limitations are to be found in the fact that I have only chosen to analyse the 7pm news broadcasts, and neglect the ones at 1pm, 6pm, and late in the evening. However, this limitation should not be exaggerated since the news broadcasts repeat each other quite often and are therefore very similar. Lastly, radio news broadcasts have also been excluded.
One could remark why I have only chosen to analyse the media coverage during the three weeks following the shooting events and not the trials of the perpetrators. Trials of mediatised criminals and alleged terrorists very often receive a lot of media attention and could therefore be an interesting case of analysis as well. The reasons why they are not included here are however very simple. First of all, Mehdi Nemmouche did not yet had to appear in court.
According to several media sources his trial has been planned for 2016.99 Secondly, Hans Van
Themsche’s trial and the associated media coverage has already been documented in several articles and even a book written by the Flemish author Gust Verwerft.100 As a result, the inclusion of the trials’ media coverage would therefore be impossible and would not lead to new results.
99 D.H., “Tuerie du musée juif: Procès envisagé pour 2016”, in: < http://www.dhnet.be/actu/faits/tuerie-du- musee-juif-proces-envisage-pour-2016-555f5ca035704bb01c6c2861>, (05/06/2016). 100 Gust Verwerft, De Zaak Hans Van Themsche. (Antwerpen :Standaard Uitgeverij, 2008) 33
3.3 Content Analysis: How does it work? The analysis itself consists of both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative part is partly based on Paul Fucito’s model, who in his turn based himself on the model of the
American professor of Media and Public Affairs Steven Livingston. Fucito uses but also expands the “routinely cited” model of Livingston to define important variables within the news coverage.101 The quantitative approach in this study firstly implies a counting of words and labels. How are both perpetrators, both violent acts, but also the targets from both incidents labelled? Which labels -and how many times- are being used in the news broadcasts and in the newspaper articles? Secondly, I have also analysed the duration of the media coverage. How much time has been spent in covering the topic on television, and how many pages and articles have been dedicated to the events?
The qualitative part demands a certain background knowledge of the political and ideological climate in the Flemish region. This segment contains an analysis of the opinions and reactions that followed the violent acts. Which persons are interviewed and chosen to react in front of the camera, and which persons are allowed to publish their opinions in the newspapers? More importantly, what do these reactions and opinions include? In other words, what is the content of their opinion and for what kind of a reaction do they call? Based on the content of these opinions and reactions, one can determine the main focus of the public debate and the public opinion that arose in the first three weeks after the incidents.
The quantitative and qualitative segments should not be viewed as completely separate from each other. The labelling of the perpetrators and the acts is for example connected to the persons using these labels in their opinion pieces or reactions. It is therefore also important to mention
101 Paul Fucito, op. cit., 21-22. 34
‘who says what’. Hence I have also had a look at the sources of the descriptive terms being used.
Lastly it is also important to mention that all the coverage that has been analysed is spoken or written in -the Flemish variant of- Dutch. As will become clear in the next chapter, the results from the analysis have been translated and processed in English. However, one has to realize that the knowledge of the exact usage of the words and their exact meaning is crucially important when conducting a media content analysis. Due to the translation process, small parts or nuances of that exact meaning might have changed. As a consequence, the results in Dutch
-and thus the exact words that have been used- have also been included with the graphs added in the appendix.
3.4 The Cases 3.4.1 Antwerp 2006 On the 11th of May 2006, in the middle of the day, 18 year old Hans Van Temsche shot three people in the streets of Antwerp. A couple of days before his raid, Van Themsche had been expelled from his school in the Flemish town of Roeselare after being caught smoking cigarettes in his room. According to many that was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ for Van
Themsche. The morning of the shootings, he shaved his hair, dressed himself with a long black leather jacket and “combat boots”, and took the train to Antwerp. Once arrived in Flanders’ largest city, he walked into a gun store and bought a shotgun that is normally used for hunting and 20 bullets. After walking around in the centre of the city for a short while, he loaded the gun while looking for his first target. Around 11.45 am he arrived at the small Pottenburg square where he shot his first target: the 46 year old Songül Koç. The Turkish woman was reading a book on a bench, when she got hit in the chest from approximately twenty meters. Koç got badly injured but eventually survived the events.
35
Meanwhile, Hans Van Themsche continued his armed march through the city centre. Two minutes after he fired his first shots, he arrived at the at the Zwartzustersstraat where he shot the 25 year old Oulematou Niangadou and the 2 year old Luna Drowart. The Malian Niangadou was the nanny of the little Antwerp girl Luna. Both died at the scene. Van Themsche aimed to look for more targets at the Grote Markt, but would never reach Antwerp’s central square. After being warned by several witnesses, policeman Marcel Van Peel shot down Hans Van Themsche at 11.54 pm, after the latter refused to put down his gun. Van Themsche received a bullet in the stomach but survives. One and a half year later, on the 11th of October 2007, Van Themsche received a lifelong sentence in prison by the court.102
3.4.2 Brussels 2014 Eight years after Hans Van Themsche shocked Antwerp, a similar incident occurred in Brussels.
In the afternoon of 24 May 2016, a 29 year old Frenchmen with Algerian roots opened fire with a Kalashnikov-rifle on several people at the entrance of the Jewish museum in the Rue des
Minimes in Brussels. The perpetrator, Mehdi Nemmouche, originated from the North French town of Roubaix. In Brussels, he managed to kill a total of four people. Two of them, Emmanuel and Miriam Riva, were Israeli visitors who were standing at the entrance of the museum. The other two were a Belgian man and French woman working for the Jewish museum: Alexandre
Strens and Dominique Sabrier.103 The latter was the only one that did not die at the scene, but several days later in the hospital.
Nemmouche succeeded in fleeing the scene and was traceless for six days. On the 30th of May, the French police arrested him on a bus in Marseille after they discovered a Kalashnikov, a revolver, and ammunition in his luggage. The French police linked the arrest of Nemmouche to
102 Saskia Castelyns, “De dag dat Antwerpen stil stond”. In: < http://www.hln.be/regio/nieuws-uit- antwerpen/de-dag-dat-antwerpen-stilstond-a2697242/>, (25/05/2016). 103 EDM, “Aanslag Joods Museum in Brussel herdacht”. In: < http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20150524_01696404>, (25/06/2016). 36 the shootings in the Jewish museum and decided to extradite him to Belgium on the 24th of July
2014. Nemmouche still awaits his trial, which is supposed to take place in 2016 (cfr. supra).
When we compare the facts of what happened in Antwerp in 2006 and in Brussels in 2014, we can notice that they are quite similar. The two perpetrators shot and killed several people with a gun during in the middle of the day. The amount of casualties that they made remained rather
‘small’, knowing that they could have easily shot more people. Both committed the crimes alone and were apparently looking for specific targets. Van Themsche shot two women from foreign origin. Afterwards he also killed the white little girl accompanying the Malian woman.
Nemmouche shot the first four people he encountered when he entered the Jewish museum in
Brussels. Finally, both were also captured alive. In the next chapter we will have a look at the
Flemish media to analyse if they have also reported these incidents similarly.
37
4. FINDINGS Before continuing to the actual results of this research it is necessary to inform the reader with some background information in order to clearly understand this chapter. It is, first of all, important to note that the results written down below should not be read in isolation but should be supplemented by an analysis of the statistical information added in the appendix. Visualizing the results in the form of graphs is essential to reach a better understanding of the media coverage of both events. Secondly, the reader should be aware of the fact that the results in the
‘labelling the perpetrator’ segment are based on all the terms that the media used to label both perpetrators besides their actual names. This basically means that whenever media used “Hans
Van Themsche” or “Mehdi Nemmouche” to refer to the perpetrators this has not been included in the results as a label.
Thirdly, as explained in chapter two, the findings are partly based on an analysis of De
Standaard and De Morgen. On sporadic days however, these newspapers published some extra editions or magazines added to the standard newspaper. These annexes have not been taken into account. Fourthly, the reader might ask himself why certain dates are not mentioned on some graphs related to the newspapers. The reason for this is simply that on those days -Sundays or holidays- no newspapers have been published. Lastly it is necessary to clarify some of the terminology used below. A ‘news story’ is the equivalent of one news report on the VRT or
VTM news. It starts when the news anchor explains the news topic and ends when the news switches to a different topic. An ‘article’ obviously represents every separate article appearing in DM or DS related to one of the shootings. An article can range from a simple report to a two pages long opinion piece.
4.1 Total amount of coverage As can be deduced from graphs A.1 and A.2, the shooting in Antwerp easily outnumbered the shooting in Brussels when it comes to the total amount of media coverage. On television, the
Flemish public witnessed a total of 9606 seconds bundled in 79 news-stories dedicated to the 38 shootings in Antwerp. With 5269 seconds and 47 stories, VRT delivered the bulk of the media attention to the Antwerp shootings. The two newspapers delivered a total of 213 articles dedicated to the events in Antwerp. DM published the majority of those: 125 articles appeared in this newspaper during the three weeks following the shooting.
Although the shooting in Brussels was significantly less covered, it is interesting that the main news-providers in the Hans Van Themsche-case are not the same than in the Mehdi
Nemmouche-case. The total coverage on television reached an amount of 4408 seconds, spread over 43 news-stories. Now, VTM delivered the majority of the seconds and stories: 2625 seconds and 23 stories. The newspapers published 60 articles related to the shooting in the
Jewish museum with 37 of those articles being published by DS.
The reasons why the shootings in Brussels drew far less attention than those in Antwerp cannot be known precisely. It is however possible to point to several factors that might have played an important role in creating this significant difference. First of all, the shooting in the Jewish museum happened precisely on the day that Belgium held political elections in the whole country. The results of the elections thus dominated the news in the weeks following the shooting in Brussels. Secondly, what could have played a role too is that the shooting from
2014 happened in Brussels, a city with a majority of French-speaking people, and the shooting from 2006 happened in Antwerp, a Flemish city. The events in Brussels could thus be interpreted as ‘less relevant’ for the Flemish people. However, I believe that the first hypothesis is the most plausible.
Another interesting question is why VRT and DM are the leading coverers in the Hans Van
Themsche case and VTM and DS are the leading coverers of the Brussels shooting. This could easily be a coincidence. It is, however, also possible that the alleged ideologies of these media channels might have played a role. The more ‘left wing’ media seems to cover the Hans Van
Themsche case, an alleged ‘racist murder’ (cfr. infra), more widely. The somewhat more centre 39 or ‘right wing’ media on the other hand covers the Jewish Museum shooting, conducted by a foreign and Muslim perpetrator, more extensively.
4.1.1 Coverage over time When we have a close look at graphs A.3 and A.4 we can see that the media-attention for the shooting in Antwerp reached its peak at the second day of coverage. For the newspapers that is the 13th of May 2006 but for the VTM and VRT that is the 12th of May 2006, since they already had the chance to cover the shooting on the 11th. After this peak the amount of coverage gradually slowed down with a minimal amount of attention between the 21st and 23rd of May.
We can notice a high peak again on the 26th of May because that was the day of the “Witte mars” or “White march” that took place in Antwerp. This march was a sign against ‘racism’ and ‘useless violence’ with 18.000 participants. DS and DM dedicated much attention to the march before it actually happened, thus in the newspapers that appeared on the 26th. After the march, the attention of the newspapers to the shooting in Antwerp gradually faded away, whilst ending more abrubtly in the television-news.
Graphs A.5 and A.6 show that the coverage of the shooting in 2014 in the Jewish museum in
Brussels more or less follows a similar pattern than the Antwerp shootings. We can see a high peak of attention immediately after the shooting which happened on the 24th of May. The newspaper coverage begins two days after the actual shooting because it took place on a
Saturday and no newspaper appeared on Sunday. The attention then slows down and reaches a low point around the 30th of May. The capture of Nemmouche first appeared in the news on the
1st of June which thus explains the sudden rise of attention in the beginning of June. Afterwards the media attention for the event gradually faded away with barely any media coverage of this event in the last of the three analysed weeks.
40
4.2 First day of coverage When a tragic event such as the shootings in Antwerp or Brussels occurs, media hurry to gather the first information as quickly as possible. Being the first to report the events seems to have become more important than reporting the events correctly. Therefore the first moments of covering the event are often full of speculations and wrong information. They can, however, have an enduring impact on an event’s long term framing.104 They could ‘set the tone’ for later coverage. Analysing the first day of coverage in depth is thus interesting and relevant. I have only analysed the first reports on the television news since television news has the chance to report the events on the day it happened. Newspapers have to wait until the next day to publish their reports.
4.2.1 Antwerp 2006 On the 11th of May 2006, VTM and VRT started the 7pm news with the events in Antwerp as a headline. VTM dedicated 535 seconds to the shooting and did not hesitate to brand the incident, which occurred only a couple of hours earlier, a ‘racist murder’. The name of the perpetrator was not yet known to the reporters who labelled him immediately as a “skinhead with extreme right wing sympathies” based on the clothes he was wearing and his shaven head.105 Van Themsche had not yet released any information about his motives, yet the VTM- reporters that reported live from Antwerp spoke about a “double murder with racist motives”.
This conclusion was based on his looks and the victims’ identity: a “woman with Turkish origins”, a “young woman from Mali”, and “a small child”. In the 596 seconds that VRT dedicated on the first day of coverage the reporters reached the same conclusion as VTM. A
“skinhead” with “extreme right wing sympathies” seemed to have chosen his targets based on their skin-colour. But besides an extreme right-wing skinhead, VRT news-anchor Martine
Tanghe also dropped the term ‘gothic’.106 Witnesses from the scene described the perpetrator
104 Paul Fucito, op. cit., pg. 31. 105 VTM Nieuws 19u. (May 11, 2006). 106 VRT Nieuws, 19u. (May 11, 2006). 41 as a goth which lead VRT to connect the perpetrator to the Gothic scene. After all the necessary information about the events in Antwerp was reported, the news broadcast continued with a story about goths and their lifestyle. VTM on the other hand chose to continue their broadcast with a story about skinhead violence towards blacks, thereby reinforcing the ‘racist murder’ hypothesis.
Political reactions did not stay away for long. VTM broadcasted the reactions of Belgium’s prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, the socialist mayor of Antwerp and Filip Dewinter, a prominent member of the Flemish-nationalist and right wing party Vlaams Belang. The prime minister did not hesitate to brand the shooting as a cowardly and extremely racist incident.
Patrick Janssens, the Antwerp mayor, called his citizens to remain calm. Finally, Dewinter branded the perpetrator as a “feeble-minded” person and argued not to “politicize” the events.
VTM also interviewed the Flemish lawyer Piet Van Eeckhaut who argued for stricter gun laws.
VRT reported the reactions of Verhofstadt and Janssens but not Dewinter’s one. Instead VRT broadcasted reactions from the immigrant community, where people demanded the government to take measures against racism.
4.2.2 Brussels 2014 The shooting in the Jewish Museum in Brussels also made it as the lead story during the first
7pm news broadcasts covering the story on the 24th of May 2014. This time, VRT-news only dedicated 262 seconds of its 7pm news to the shooting. By broadcasting 580 seconds of news related to the events in Brussels, VTM spent more than double the amount of seconds than
VRT. It would take several days before the actual perpetrator of this event was captured.
Therefore both VTM and VRT remained fairly restrained on labelling the shooter. The only words used were “man” and “perpetrator”. What was more intensively discussed however was the actual act. The fact that the perpetrator attacked people in the Jewish museum brought VRT news anchor Annelies Van Herck to the conclusion that it was possibly an “anti-Semitic
42 attack”.107 Also VTM news drew the same conclusion. However VTM went one step further when news anchor Danny Verstraeten asked a reporter in Brussels if “we could speak of a possible terror attack”.108 The VTM-reporter answered that it was “too early to make statements about terrorism” since the police did not know the identity of the perpetrator yet. VRT and
VTM-news reported the targets as “three dead, whom two women and one man, and one man heavily wounded”.
In its extensive report, VTM also showed several political reactions. Wouter Van Besien and
Kris Peeters from the Flemish Christian-Democratic party preferred to use the neutral term
‘shooting’ and ‘murder’. Also their Walloon counterpart Joëlle Milquet refused to use any term related to antisemitism, calling it “too early to judge”. As a consequence of these events however, enhanced security measures at Jewish institutions all over the country were taken immediately.
4.2.3 Comparison As will become clear later, the first reports of the shooting in Antwerp immediately set the tone for the future news-broadcasts. An ‘extreme right wing skinhead’ deliberately chose his targets in what appeared to be a ‘racist murder’. This ‘racist murder by an extremist’-frame would be very influential in future reports. This was also the case with the first reports on the shooting in
Brussels, however to a lesser extent. Barely any information had been gathered about the perpetrator. The early conclusion that the media dared to make was that it was possibly an act of ‘antisemitism’. VTM-news chose to go a little bit further by putting forward the ‘terrorism- hypothesis’, which would gradually become more and more influential in future news reports.
107 VRT Nieuws 19u. (May 24, 2014). 108 VTM Nieuws 19u. (May 24, 2014). 43
4.3 Labelling the Perpetrators 4.3.1 Antwerp 2006 Besides being called by his name, Hans Van Themsche received many labels in the Flemish media ranging from a “Nazi-killer” to a “nice guy”. When we have a look at graph B.1 we can see that the television media labelled him in thirteen different ways. The most popular label was the neutral “young man”. The most frequently used ‘value-laden’ label on television was
“extreme right wing perpetrator”, closely followed by “skinhead”.
It is possible to divide this graphic into four different kind of labels. Firstly the ‘neutral’ ones, like “young man”, “shooter” and “murderer”. Together they deliver almost one third or 32 percent of the used labels on television. Secondly we can see more value-laden labels that are related to the right-wing extremism and racism. Part of this group are “skinhead”, “racist”,
“Nazi-killer” and “extreme right wing perpetrator”. With its total of 35 percent, this group forms a majority. The third group consists of terms such as “lunatic”, “isolated case”, “feeble- minded”, “gothic” and “sick man”, labelling Hans Van Themsche as a mentally-ill or troubled person. It occupies a total of 24 percent of the labels. The last 9 percent is occupied by the “nice guy” label.
It is also important to know the sources of the labels. The first and ‘neutral’ group of labels were mostly used by the news anchors and reporters. Also the second group was often used by the news anchors and reporters of VTM and VRT. “Extreme right wing perpetrator” was also the label used by the leaders of the police-investigation. Striking was that the labels used in the reactions from members of the political right-wing belonged almost exclusively to the third group, blaming the murder on Hans Van Themsche’s ‘disturbed’ personality. Vlaams Belang member Filip Dewinter used the term “feeble-minded” while trying to distance him and his party from the murders. Finally, the “nice guy” label might sound somewhat odd but was often used by classmates and family members of Van Themsche. They often reacted shocked and
44 completely surprised by the latter’s acts, whom they would have never expected to do something like this.
The results coming from the written press are not that different overall. When we have a look at graph B.2, we can notice that DM and DS preferred to use the ‘neutral’ label “shooter” much more instead of “young man”, which was very popular on television. Here, “skinhead” takes the prize of most used ‘value-laden’ term, “perpetrator” comes in as a new term that has – somewhat surprisingly- not been used on television, and “nice guy” loses 6 percent in comparison with the newspapers. We can also observe that there is a bigger diversity of used labels in the newspapers: a total of 17. Also in this case we can divide the graph into bigger categories, consisting of different labels. The ‘neutral’ group this time possesses 46 percent of the total, hence being the big majority. The group consists of “young man”, “shooter”, “killer”,
“murderer” and “perpetrator”. The group labelling Hans Van Themsche as a “right wing extremist”, “skinhead”, “racist” or “Nazi” possesses 33 percent. “Cowboy”, “isolated lunatic”,
“gothic”, “parasite”, “derailed individual” and “psychopath” also form a group of 15 percent.
The last 6 percent is being occupied by “nice guy” and “discrete pupil”
The neutral terms were mostly used by the newspapers’ journalists. The second group of labels was often used in factual reports from journalists -especially in DM- and in the many reactions and opinion pieces, especially those from members of the allochtone or immigrant communities. Right wing politicians and especially the Vlaams Belang were the main proclaimers of the third group of labels. VB chairman Franck Vanhecke explicitly distanced his party from the alleged ‘racist shootings’ by dismissing Van Themsche as an “isolated lunatic”109 and a “parasite”110 hijacking the right wing movement. The Flemish-nationalist and conservative journalist Paul Beliën followed the same discourse as VB by labelling the
109 De Standaard. (May 13, 2006) 2-3. 110 De Standaard. (May 16, 2006) 8-9. 45 perpetrator as a “derailed individual”.111 Lastly, the somewhat ‘positive’ group of labels were again used by people that had known Van Themsche from nearby. An example is Van
Themsche’s former Kendo-trainer who declared that he did not at all recognized his trainee as a racist but rather as a nice and “discrete pupil”.112
4.3.2 Brussels 2014 Graph B.3 shows that VRT and VTM gave 15 different labels to the perpetrator of the shooting in the Jewish museum in Brussels. Just as with the reporting of the shooting in Antwerp, the neutral label “young man” was the most popular one. The second place is shared by
“perpetrator”, “Syria-fighter” and “terror suspect”. Also here, several labels are related to each other and could therefore be fitted together into bigger categories. The first group consists again of ‘neutral’ labels such as “young man”, “perpetrator”, “shooter”, “murderer” and “heavily armed man” and occupies a total of 39 percent. “Syria-fighter”, “anti-Jewish”, “Jihadi”,
“radical” and “Muslim warrior” form the second group with 25 percent of labels and connect
Mehdi Nemmouche to radical Islamic and anti-Jewish motives. The third group calls the perpetrator a “terrorist” or “terror suspect” and possesses 22 percent of the used labels. Lastly, the labels “professional” and “cool-blooded” person form a small group of 11 percent referring to a perpetrator that remained calm and knew what he was doing. These labels suggest that he was well prepared and therefore had a clear goal. The “lone wolf” label does not clearly belong to one group and is thus being left out. However, it is often associated with terrorism and if we had to pick one group it would probably be the second one.
During the first eight days of media coverage VRT and VTM-news predominantly used the
‘neutral’ labels and the labels referring to the calm and professional approach of the perpetrator, with occasionally pushing forward a hypothesis about the perpetrator’s motives. Gradually, the
111 De Standaard. (May 16, 2006) 8-9. 112 De Standaard. ((May 12, 2006) 6-7. 46
‘terrorism-hypothesis’ became “more and more likely”113 based on the target of the shooting which suggested that “the perpetrator was likely to be found in the environment of Syria fighters”.114 On the first of June, VTM and VRT news anchors Elke Pattyn and Wim De Vilder could inform their viewers that the possible perpetrator of the shooting was arrested in
Marseille.115 From this day onwards we can notice a significant switch from predominantly using ‘neutral’ labels to labels connecting Nemmouche to terrorism, the war is Syria and radical
Islam. After his arrest, the French minister of interior also reacted on Belgian television, stating that they had captured a “terrorist”.116
The neutral labels were also by far the most popular in DS and DM, as graph B.4 clearly demonstrates. From a total of fifteen labels, the six neutral labels occupy a massive majority of 68 percent. Part of this group are “shooter”, “man”, “perpetrator”, “suspect”, “fugitive” and
“murderer”. The “terrorist”-label was being used 13 percent of the time. “Jew hater”, “Syria fighter”, “radical” “racist loner”, “fundamentalist” and “Jihadi” form a group of 14 percent. The last five percent consist of “lone wolf” and “professional”. In this case, both labels do not specifically belong to a bigger category and therefore form groups on their own.
As was the case with the news broadcasts on television, the neutral terms were predominantly used during the days prior to the arrest of Nemmouche. More ‘subjective’ and colourful terms appeared in the newspapers during the first week of June, when the perpetrator’s identity was known by the press. The word “terrorist” appeared already in DS for the first time on the 27th of May. Moreover, DS used it in its headline: “Klopjacht op Terrorist”.117 DM-journalists waited until Nemmouche was arrested to use the term.
113 VRT Nieuws 19u (May 26, 2014). 114 VTM Nieuws 19u (May 28, 2014). 115 VRT Nieuws 19u (June 1, 2014). ; VTM Nieuws 19u, (June 1 2014). 116 VTM Nieuws 19u (June 2, 2014). 117 De Standaard. (May 27, 2014) 1. 47
4.3.3 Comparison In both cases, Flemish media predominantly used ‘neutral’ terms such as “shooter” or “man” to label the perpetrators. This was especially the case with the media coverage of the shooting in the Jewish museum. The reason for this is obvious. The police managed to capture Van
Themsche immediately after his murders in Antwerp. Therefore his identity was known right away by the press, which allowed it to speculate comprehensively about his nature and motives.
Nemmouche’s identity however, was only known in the beginning of June. As a consequence, the Flemish media did probably not dare to speculate too much and preferred to predominantly use neutral labels.
Without taking the neutral terms into account, words framing Van Themsche as a violent advocate of the extreme right wing and a murdering racist that deliberately chose his targets constituted a big majority. A minority of contrarians, who were most likely to be found in conservative and politically right-wing circles, preferred to frame the perpetrator of the
Antwerp shooting as a mentally ill man. Although Mehdi Nemmouche seemed to have a clear target as well -people in the Jewish Museum- the nature of the labels was significantly different than the ones used in the Van Themsche case. Flemish media predominantly framed him as a radical Islamist and terrorist -two tags that are often connected to each other in the contemporary discourse (cfr. supra)- and not as a racist. Graph B.9 learns us that 16 percent of all the labels were related to Nemmouche being a terrorist. From a ‘mentally ill person’-hypothesis, no trace could be found this time.
4.4 Labelling the Act 4.4.1 Antwerp 2006 VRT and VTM combined used a total of 9 different terms to label Hans Van Themsche’s acts on the 11th of May 2006. By having a look at graph B.5 we can clearly see that the word
“murder” stands out as the most popular label. Sometimes it was being used in a neutral way, and sometimes news anchors, reporters and people reacting to the events added the word
48
“racist” to clarify the alleged motives of the murders. The neutral group of labels, consisting of
“attack”, “murder” and “shooting” contributed to 41 percent of the total. 50 percent of the labels referred to the act as having racist motives. The final 9 percent exists of the labels “suicide mission” and “useless violence”. The ones tagging the shooting as ‘racist’ were mostly the news anchors, politicians and intellectuals from various political parties, and people from the immigrant communities who were allowed to react on television quite often. Neutral terms were predominantly used by the news anchors and reporters, and also by members of Vlaams Belang who were intensively discussed in various news stories during the aftermath of the events.
Prominent member of the Flemish nationalist party Gerolf Annemans for example, condemned the “attacks” but was reluctant to label them as racist.118
The newspapers used 10 different terms to label the act. Graph B.6 shows that 42 percent of them were the neutral labels “murder”, “shooting”, “raid” and “attack”, 48 percent referred to the shootings as being racist, and the remaining 10 percent are occupied by “suicide mission and “useless violence”. Again we can notice the same tendencies as was the case with the VRT and VTM news. Journalists, politicians from various parties, intellectuals, and various representatives from the immigrant community were the main providers of the racism-related labels. Opinion pieces and reactions from representatives from the political right wing movement and especially the beleaguered Vlaams Belang again demonstrated a general reluctance to use the labels related to racism.
4.4.2 Brussels 2014 On graph B.7 we can notice 9 different labels used by VRT and VTM-news. For the same reason as with the labelling of the perpetrator in the Brussels case, the group of neutral labels – consisting of “shooting”, “attack” and “murder”- formed the great majority of the used labels with a total of 64 percent. Not knowing the nature of the perpetrator and his motives during the
118 VTM Nieuws 19u. (May 18, 2006). 49 first week of the coverage resulted in a general reluctance of using coloured and meaningful labels. 25 percent of the labels were terrorism-related. Two days after the shooting, VRT openly speculated about a “possible terror attack”, which they based on statements from the Federal
Prosecutor that “it might have been a terror attack”.119 After the arrest of Nemmouche and the information that he had radical Islamic sympathies, VRT moved on from speculating to with certainty calling it a “terror attack”. The VTM news-team seemed already more certain to confidently brand it as a “terror attack” before the capture of Nemmouche. When VRT-news called it a “possible terror attack”, VTM-news labelled the shooting as a “terror attack”.120 9 percent of the labels pointed to the alleged anti-Semitic nature of the attack. Labels such as
“antisemitism” and “anti-Semitic attack” were mostly used during the very first days of coverage and especially by representatives of the Jewish community, to whom VTM and VRT- news dedicated a fair amount of stories. The last 2 percent is occupied by the label “useless violence”.
Graph B.8 shows that, also in the newspapers, the neutral labels -consisting of “shooting”,
“attack”, “raid”, and “murder”- formed a majority with a total of 57 percent. 23 percent of the labels were terrorism-related, 17 percent of the labels emphasized antisemitism and the last 3 percent is occupied by the label “bloodbath”. The total amount of used labels is 10 and thus barely differs from the television news. The main providers of the terrorism-related labels were articles related to the investigation lead by the federal prosecutor –since it considered the attack as the work of a terrorist since almost the beginning of the investigation-, and interviews or columns from representatives of the Jewish community or the Jewish museum. The director of the Jewish museum in Brussels Phillipe Blondin for example reacted shocked to what he called a “terror attack”.121 Striking is that in various newspaper articles, antisemitism and terrorism
119 VRT Nieuws 19u. (May 26, 2014). 120 VTM Nieuws 19u. (May 26, 2014). 121 De Standaard. (May 31, 2014) 17. 50 were often connected to each other. On the 28th of May 2014 a journalist from DS literally wrote that “because the attack has an anti-Semitic character, everything points into the direction of terrorism”.122 Also the alleged professionality of the perpetrator and the calmness with which he performed his acts lead journalists to conclude that “this attack was an act of terror”.123
4.4.3 Comparison Comparing the labelling of both acts allows us to make several interesting remarks. Firstly, we can notice that, generally speaking, the Flemish media restrained itself more from using
‘subjective’ labels in the three weeks of coverage since the attack in the Jewish museum in
Brussels than in the coverage of the Antwerp shooting. Racism-related labels formed the majority in the covering of the Van Themsche case, whereas neutral labels represented the bulk of the coverage of the Nemmouche case. The likely reason for this difference has already been mentioned earlier: not knowing the identity of the perpetrator of the Brussels shooting in the first week since it happened probably held media back from drawing too early conclusions.
Secondly, when we do not take the neutral labels into account, we can see that the shooting of
2006 was predominantly framed as an act of racism, whereas the shooting of 2014 was mainly framed as an act of terrorism and antisemitism. The latter two labels were sometimes even connected to each other as if an act of antisemitism is automatically an act of terrorism. Graph
B.10 clearly shows the impact of the ‘terrorism’-frame in the coverage of the shooting in
Brussels. Almost 1/4th of the total amount of labels -used in both the television news and newspapers- were related to terrorism.
4.5 Labelling the Targets This segment is slightly different than the two previous ones. The results that are represented in graphs B.11 and B.12 do not show all the different terms that have been used to label the targets of both shootings. Instead they demonstrate when VRT-news, VTM-news, DS and DM
122 De Standaard. (May 28, 2014) 18-19. 123 De Morgen. (May 27, 2014) 10. 51 referred to the native origins or skin colour of the victims. When journalists refer to “black
Oulematou”, the “Flemish Luna” or “an Israeli couple” that means that these references are a
‘reference-label’. When only the victims’ names or neutral terms like “victim” or “young man” were used that means that the label belongs to the ‘no-reference’ side.
4.5.1 Antwerp 2006 Looking at graph B.11 gives us some interesting results about the media-labelling of Van
Themsche’s three targets. Firstly, Luna Drowart was the most mentioned of the three victims.
Her nanny Oulematou Niangadou comes in at second place and the least media-attention was given to Songül Koç, the only survivor of the shooting. It is however striking to see that the big majority of the references to Luna Drowart did not at all mention her Belgian or Flemish origins and white skin colour, whereas the majority of the references to Songül Koç and Oulematou
Niangadou did mention their “Turkish”, “Muslim”, “Malian” or “black” origins. Already since the beginning of the coverage, media seemed to believe it was relevant and important to mention those foreign backgrounds.
4.5.2 Brussels 2014 In comparison to the targets in the Antwerp shooting, none of the victims of the shooting in
Brussels survived. When we look at B.12 we can notice a clear divide between the Belgian and
French victims, Alexandre Strens and Dominique Chabrier, and the Israeli victims, the Riva couple. Firstly, the media mentioned Miriam and Emanuel Riva much more than the two other victims. Secondly, media often referred to the Israeli background of the Riva couple, whereas this was to a much lesser extent the case with the French and Belgian victim.
4.5.3 Comparison In both cases we noticed a very small amount of references to the nationality and ethnic background of the Belgian victims. Luna Drowart and Alexandre Strens were mostly mentioned just by their names. We could argue that the reason for this is that, in contrast to the labelling of foreigners, Flemish media just do not see the relevance of mentioning the nationality of
52 someone from Belgium. However, graph B.12 shows that also the French victim of the shooting in Brussels was barely mentioned together with her French national background. References to
Koç, Niangadou, and the two Riva’s on the other hand were often accompanied with their
Turkish, Malian and Israeli origins. Mentioning these backgrounds perfectly fits the main media-narrative about the shootings. Referring to the “black Oulematou” or “Turkish Songül” strengthens the framing of the shooting in Antwerp as a racist incident conducted by a right wing extremist. Emphasizing Luna Drowart’s “white” skin-colour might have been less relevant, since it does not perfectly fit into the story of a “racist shooting”. The same hypothesis could be applied on the Brussels shooting. The Flemish media seemed to have found it less relevant to mention the backgrounds of the non-Israeli victims, because that does not perfectly fit in the framing of the shooting as an anti-Semitic and terrorist incident.
4.6 Reactions after the events 4.6.1 Antwerp 2006 Hans Van Themsche’s actions induced shocked reactions in Belgium. The enormous media attention to the murders was partly a result of the severity of the events –three people got shot in the centre of a big city in the middle of the day- but also partly because during the weeks before the murders Belgium got shaken up by a couple of other incidents of ‘useless violence’.
In April the infamous murder on Joe Van Holsbeeck took place in Brussels, on the 1st of May
Mohamed Bouazza drowned in the Schelde river in what according to some was a ‘racist murder’ and in the weekend before Hans Van Themsche’s shooting two skinheads had physically attacked two immigrants in the city of Bruges. Hence, the tragedy on the 11th of May
2006 was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back”.
As already became clear from analysing the labelling of the perpetrator, act and targets of the
Antwerp shooting, media mainly framed this event as a racist murder. In the public debate following the events the most discussed topic was the alleged responsibility of Vlaams Belang.
53
By several journalists, politicians, intellectuals and ordinary people, this party was seen as the instigator of a ‘racist’ climate in Flanders by demonising immigrants. What made these murders even more difficult for Vlaams Belang was that Hans Van Themsche’s aunt, Frieda Van
Themsche, was a prominent member of the party.
Opinion pieces about racism and the Vlaams Belang dominated DS and DM in the aftermath of the shootings. On the 12th of May, DS already published an opinion piece written by Fouad
Gandou about racism in Flanders whereas Van Themsche’s motives were not yet known.124 In the weeks that followed, barely anyone besides members of the Vlaams Belang themselves denied that racism was inherent to this party. Some, like Abou Jajah, who was then the leader of the Arab-European League, went even further by arguing that racism was inherent to Flemish people in general.125 Jajah’s statements on their turn provoked reactions from people arguing that he acted “exactly the same as Vlaams Belang” by “polarizing” society.126 The critical question was however if Vlaams Belang could directly be held responsible for the murders.
Politicians like Bart De Wever, Johan Vande Lanotte or Jean Marie Dedecker were among the advocates of the theory that VB could not be held responsible. Others like Karel De Gucht and
Bert Anciaux believed the party was responsible because of its aggressive rhetoric. Some political parties like the left-wing SPA and Spirit even wanted to use this incident to take away
Vlaams Belang’s subsidies.
The public debate about racism in Flanders and the alleged responsibility of Vlaams Belang also translated itself to the streets of Belgium. Several marches and protests against “racism” and “useless violence” -of which the largest and best organized was the “white march” in
Antwerp on the 26th of May 2006- were organized during the first weeks since the shooting.
During the “white march”, relatives of Oulematou Niangadou lashed out at Vlaams Belang.
124 De Standaard. (May 12, 2006) 16. 125 De Standaard. (May 22, 2006) 22. 126 De Standaard. (May 24, 2006) 24. 54
Also the parents of Luna Drowart critiqued the Vlaams Belang after the party released a new campaign poster with a white girl looking similar to the little victim of Van Themsche’s shooting.127
Eventually, the murders in Antwerp did not result in Vlaams Belang being convicted, fined or directly punished in one or another way. However, Vlaams Belang definitely had to deal with massive criticism, severely damaging their image. The shootings were definitely the biggest
‘uppercut’ Vlaams Belang had to endure since its conviction of racism in 2004. Moreover, the
Belgian local elections of October 2006 did not bring the results Vlaams Belang hoped for in the city of Antwerp. One could argue that Van Themsche’s actions might have been one of the reasons for this disappointing result but this cannot be stated with certainty.
To a lesser extent than the debate about racism and Vlaams Belang, the discussion about gun control in Belgium attracted the attention of the Flemish media. Almost all Belgian political parties, besides the Walloon and liberal MR, and prominent intellectuals endorsed stricter gun laws after the many shocked reactions on the ease with which Hans Van Themsche could buy a deadly firearm. The massive pressure eventually resulted in the Belgian parliament voting a stricter gun law on the 9th of June 2006.128
4.6.2 Brussels 2014 Although the shooting in Brussels was similar to the Antwerp shooting -a lone wolf killing
‘innocents’, allegedly based on racial or ideological convictions- it caused less public outrage.
Besides some moments of silence in remembrance of the victims, the shooting in Brussels did not result in protest marches with thousands of participants as was the case after the Antwerp shooting. Also the tone and the amount of discussion held in the press in the aftermath of the
Brussels shooting was less intense than in the aftermath of the Antwerp shooting. The main
127 VTM Nieuws 19u. (May 17, 2006) 128 VRT Nieuws 19u. (June 9, 2006). 55 point of discussion was the potential rise and threat of antisemitism and terrorism. Some prominent representatives of the Jewish community in Belgium were interviewed or were allowed to publish opinion pieces in DS and DM. Joël Rubinfeld from the ‘Belgian League against Antisemitism’ worried if Jewish people were still “going to let their children go to school”.129 Michael Freilich, director of the Jewish magazine ‘Joods Actueel’, warned that a
“climate of terror” was entering Belgian society.130 Although the outrage in Belgium was profoundly less than eight years earlier, the alleged anti-Semitic and terrorist nature of this attack caused more international reactions this time. José Manuel Barroso, William Hague,
Pope Francis and Benjamin Netanyahu –to only name a few- all condemned the attack. Barroso called the shooting “an attack against the European values”. Netanyahu went further and pointed to a “continuous smear campaign against Israel” as the root cause of this attack.131
The Belgian government did not wait long translate the Jewish concerns into action. Shortly after but still on the day of the shooting, the government increased the “threat level for terrorism” to the maximum number. Moreover, various increased security measures were taken at Jewish institutions and places where Jewish people normally come together. 132
Some, like the director of the ‘Belgian Centre for equal opportunities and opposition against
Racism’, argued not to conclude too early that a Muslim was behind this attack.133 After the arrest of Nemmouche the attention of the media shifted from antisemitism to radical Islam,
Syria-fighters and terrorism. Several “terrorism-experts” were allowed to give their opinions and advice on how to successfully prevent attacks from “lone wolfs” and Syria-fighters that had returned to Europe.134
129 De Standaard. (June 26, 2014) 1. 130 De Standaard. (June 26, 2014) 4-5. 131 De Standaard. (June 26, 2014) 6-7. 132 VTM Nieuws 19u. (May 24, 2014). 133 De Morgen. (May 26, 2014) 21. 134 De Standaard. (June 3, 2014) 6. ; De Standaard. (June 2, 2014) 8. 56
5. CONCLUSION The real motivation behind Hans Van Themsche’s murders is still controversial. What certainly does not help to understand his motives are the latter’s contradictory statements about these motives. Author Gust Verwerft, who wrote a book on Van Themsche’s trial, believes that the perpetrator of the Antwerp shooting in 2006 is not what the media made of him. Verwerft criticizes “the wrong perception” of Hans Van Themsche, to the utmost extent created by the media. He claims that the young shooter had nothing to do with racism, but was a man who was extremely frustrated with his school situation.135 Nevertheless, one and a half year after the shooting Hans Van Themsche is being sentenced to a lifelong imprisonment for “racist murder”.136 Hence, the judges and the jury followed the main discourse that appeared in the media on Hans Van Themsche.
This discourse basically argued that the latter was an extreme right wing racist murderer, who deliberately shot the “black Oulematou”, “Turkish Songul” and “little Luna”. Vlaams Belang could be held accountable as implicit instigators of a ‘racist climate’ in Flanders which created a possibility for these kind of murders to occur. Contrarians that were to be found in mostly right wing circles on the other hand tried to blame it on Van Themsche’s alleged “mental illness” and “disturbed personality”, and called not to politicize the shooting.
The other protagonist of this research, Mehdi Nemmouche, still awaits his trial. If, as has been the case with Hans Van Themsche, the judges and the jury will also tend to follow the main discourse that appeared in the media after the shootings in Brussels, then Nemmouche will be convicted for a terrorist murder and anti-Semitic attack on the Jewish museum.
135 Verwerf explains his book in this Youtube video: S Crimineel, “Boek – De zaak Hans Van Themsche” In: < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyDmJAxDtV8> (25/6/2016). 136 DS, “Van Themsche is Racistische Moordenaar” in: < http://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf10102007_123> (25/6/2016). 57
Analysing the media coverage during the three weeks following two similar shootings that shocked Belgium leads one to draw some interesting conclusions. First of all we can notice that within the Flemish media there seems to be an general restraint of bringing ‘too coloured’ news.
Often, the media used ‘neutral’ descriptive terms to label both perpetrators and their acts. This was especially the case with the media coverage of the shooting in the Jewish museum in
Brussels. But without taking the neutral labels into account, one can notice that the media created two completely different stories. Some of the reasons for this are obvious and definitely justifiable. Hans Van Themsche’s obscure outfit and shaven head, the foreign origins some of his victims, some of the contradictory statements that he made after the shootings, and the incidents of ‘racism’ and ‘useless violence’ that shortly predated the latter’s raid resulted in the
Flemish media predominantly using the ‘racist murder-frame’. This frame had been used since the very beginning of the media coverage. The fact that Mehdi Nemmouche had only been captured a couple of days after his attack resulted in the Flemish media initially being more reluctant in making ‘big’ statements on the nature of the perpetrator and the attack. However, the Jewish museum being the target made it tempting to speculate about an anti-Semitic and maybe even terrorist attack. After the confirmation that the putative perpetrator was a young
Muslim deliberately targeting the Jewish museum, the Flemish media could also confirm that the shooting in Brussels was a terror attack. Therefore we could conclude that the Flemish media used the ‘anti-Semitic and terrorist attack’ frame to report the events in Brussels.
As explained in the second chapter, there is no academic and political unanimity on a definition of terrorism. As a consequence, also media sometimes seem to have an arbitrary approach to the terrorism-concept. Although we cannot find any trace of the Antwerp shooting being reported in the Flemish media as a ‘terrorist’ event one could perfectly argue that Hans Van
Themsche was indeed a terrorist. Deliberately shooting people, allegedly based on their ethnic origins, and in this way causing fear within immigrant communities could -because of the
58 inexistent consensus on the definition of terrorism- perfectly be interpreted as an act of terrorism. But the Flemish media chose not to do that. What if Hans Van Themsche was a young
Muslim? One could only wonder how the media would have reacted then. Would they then have reported the shooting in the same way as the shooting in Brussels? Would the perpetrator of the Antwerp shooting then be labelled as a terrorist? In a society where if one says terrorism one says radical Islam this is definitely a plausible hypothesis. And what if the perpetrator of the shooting in Brussels was not a French-Algerian Muslim but a French neo-Nazi? Would the media then also have used the ‘terrorism’-frame or would it have branded the attacks as racist?
The analysis of the Flemish media coverage of these two events showed that not the nature of the attacks -both were quite similar- but the nature of the perpetrators and the targets seems to be decisive in the defining who is the terrorist and who is the racist murderer. This more or less confirms that first of all media in Flanders -just as in the United States for example- uses double standards or at least uses different frames to report the attacks. Secondly, it shows that terrorism is once again used to depict ‘the other’. A white person shooting people on the other hand becomes a racist or a mentally ill person.
The use of these double standards is something that has to be criticised. Terrorism is a tactic that can be deployed by anyone, not only by Muslims. Racism and mental illness on the other hand is also something which is not exclusively a white and Western phenomenon. Instead of analysing events through pre-packed frames, media has the obligation to go in depth and to be willing to nuance. One could for example only wonder how the media would have reported the crash of Germanwings flight 9525 if Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot who deliberately crashed the plane was a Muslim? Would the media then also have reported this tragedy by pointing to the latter’s psychiatric and mental problems or would they have speculated about a “possible case of terrorism”? The same could be applied on Omar Mateen, the gunman who recently killed
49 people in a nightclub in Orlando. The United States treated this event as an act of ‘domestic
59 terrorism’, but would this also have been the case if the perpetrator would have been a white
American? The answer to this question is doubtful.
60
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(May 28, 2014). De Standaard. (May 30, 2014). De Standaard. (May 31, 2014). De Standaard. (June 2, 2014). De Standaard. (June 3, 2014). De Standaard. (June 4, 2014). De Standaard. (June 5, 2014). De Standaard. (June 6, 2014). De Standaard. (June 7, 2014). De Standaard. (June 9, 2014). De Standaard. (June 10, 2014). De Standaard. (June 11, 2014). De Standaard. (June 12, 2014). De Standaard. (June 13, 2014). 70 7. APPENDIX A. Amount of coverage A.1 Total amount of news stories 50 45 40 35 30 25 20 Numberstories of 15 10 5 0 VRT VTM Antwerp Jewish Museum Brussels A.2 Total amount of newspaper articles 140 120 100 80 articles 60 Number of 40 20 0 De Standaard De Morgen Antwerp Brussels: Jewish Museum 71 A.3 Amount of seconds dedicated over time: Antwerp 1600 1400 1200 1000 800 Seconds 600 400 200 0 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Days in May and June VRT VTM A.4 Amount of newspaperarticles over time: Antwerp 25 20 15 10 Numberarticles of 5 0 12 13 15 16 17 18 19 20 22 23 24 26 27 29 30 31 1 Days in May and June De Morgen De Standaard 72 A.5 Amount of seconds dedicated over time: Jewish Museum in Brussels 800 700 600 500 400 Seconds 300 200 100 0 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 Days in May and June VRT VTM A.6 Amount of newspaper articles over time: Jewish Museum in Brussels 12 10 8 6 4 Numberarticles of 2 0 26 27 28 30 31 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Days in May and June De Morgen De Standaard 73 B. Labelling perpetrator, act and target B.1 Labelling Perpetrator Hans Van Themsche VRT and VTM News 9% 11% 6% 3% 3% 6% 9% 12% 6% 9% 14% 3% 9% Skinhead Zwakzinnig (Feeble-minded) Gek (Lunatic) Extreemrechtse dader (Extreme right wing perpetrator) Jongeman (Young man) Schutter (Shooter) Geïsoleerd geval (Isolated case) Vriendelijke jongen (Nice, sympathetic guy) Zieke man (Sick man) Racist Nazidoder (Nazi-killer) Gothic Moordenaar (Murderer) 74 B.2 Labelling Perpetrator Hans Van Themsche De Standaard and De Morgen 3% 3% 1%3% 16% 19% 4% 3% 4% 10% 1% 3% 5% 8% 4% 1% 12% Jongeman (Young man) Skinhead Gothic Brave jongen (Nice guy) Killer Cowboy Nazi Dader (Perpetrator) Moordenaar (Murderer) Parasiet (Parasite) Rechts extremist (Rightwing extremist) Geïsoleerde gek (Isolated lunatic) Racist Schutter (Shooter) Ontspoord individu (Derailed individual) Psychopaat (Psychopath) Onopvallende leerling (Discrete pupil) 75 B.3 Labelling Perpetrator Mehdi Nemmouche VRT and VTM News 3% 3% 8% 3% 3% 8% 16% 14% 14% 3% 3% 3% 3% 2% 14% Koelbloedig persoon (Cool-blooded person) Jongeman (Young man) Dader (Perpetrator) Syriëstrijder (Syria-fighter) Anti-Joods (Anti-Jewish) Schutter (Shooter) Moordenaar (Murderer) Radicaal (Radical) Professional Terreurverdachte (Terror suspect) Terrorist Jihadi Zwaargewapende man (Heavily armed man) Lone Wolf Moslimstrijder (Muslim warrior) 76 B.4 Labelling Perpetrator Mehdi Nemmouche De Standaard and De Morgen 1% 4% 3% 22% 13% 1% 6% 9% 1% 1% 1% 6% 7% 1% 24% Schutter (Shooter) Man (Man) Verdachte (Suspect) Jodenhater (Jew hater) Dader (Perpetrator) Syriëstrijder (Syria fighter) Radicaal (Radical) Professional Voortvluchtige (Fugitive) Moordenaar (Murderer) Racistische eenzaat (Racist loner) Terrorist Fundamentalist Jihadist (Jihadi) Lone Wolf 77 B.5 Labelling Act - Antwerp 2006 - VRT and VTM 7% 7% 2% 26% 13% 6% 7% 4% 28% Racistische moord (Racist murder) Aanslag (Attack) Moord (Murder) Racistische daad (Racist act) Racistisch geweld (Racist violence) Racisme (Racism) Zelfmoordmissie (Suicide mission) Zinloos geweld (Useless violence) Schietpartij (Shooting) B.6 Labelling Act - Antwerp 2006 - De Standaard and De Morgen 5% 5% 9% 30% 1% 13% 4% 4% 1% 28% Racistische moord (Racist murder) Aanslag (Attack) Moord (Murder) Racistische daad (Racist act) Racistisch geweld (Racist violence) Racisme (Racism) Zelfmoordmissie (Suicide mission) Zinloos geweld (Useless violence) Schietpartij (Shooting) Raid 78 B.7 Labelling Act - Brussels 2014 - VRT and VTM 3% 2% 1% 16% 9% 5% 8% 17% 39% Schietpartij (Shooting) Antisemitische aanslag (Antisemitic attack) Aanslag (Attack) Terreuraanslag (Terror attack) Terrorisme (Terrorism) Moord (Murder) Antisemitisme (Antisemitism) Terreur (Terror) Zinloos geweld (Useless violence) 79 B.8 Labelling Act - Brussels 2014 - De Standaard and De Morgen 3% 2% 2% 8% 7% 10% 15% 6% 32% 15% Schietpartij (Shooting) Antisemitische aanslag (Antisemitic attack) Aanslag (Attack) Terreuraanslag (Terror attack) Terrorisme (Terrorism) Moord (Murder) Antisemitisme (Antisemitism) Terreur (Terror) Bloedbad (Bloodbath) Raid 80 B.9 Labelling the Pepretrator in Brussels: terrorist-related or not 16% 84% Terrorist-related Something else B.10 Labelling the Act in Brussels: terrorism- related or not 24% 76% Terrorism-related Something else 81 B.11 Labelling Targets: references to origins or skin colour 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 Amount mentions of 20 10 0 Luna Drowart (BEL) Songül Koç (TUR) Oulematou Niangadou (MAL) Reference No reference B.12 Labelling Targets: references to origins or skin colour 16 14 12 10 8 6 Amount mentions of 4 2 0 Alexandre Strens (BEL) Dominique Chabrier Miriam Riva (ISR) Emanuel Riva (ISR) (FRA) Astitel Reference No reference 82