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Unfairly Treated in Brussels
05/25/2009 :: On June 7, the Flemings will go to the voting booth to elect their representatives for the European Parliament and for the Flemish regional parliament, both based in Brussels. The mainstream media, which all receive government subsidies, are actively fighting the Vlaams Belang. They refuse to run VB adds and hardly devote any attention to Belgium’s main opposition party. In the past, parties were assigned broadcasting time to run a short informative television spot of their own on the state television channel. This, too, has now been abolished. A journalist openly admitted: “In these broadcasts, Filip Dewinter could openly express his political views. This was sufficient reason to ban these broadcasts.”
Especially during the electoral campaign the Belgian media devote as little attention as possible to the VB. Last April, Prof. Bart Maddens of Leuven University published figures about the 2007 election campaign period. He calculated how many times the newspapers mentioned the candidates of the major parties and found that an average Socialist candidate was mentioned 25 times, a Liberal 23 times, a Christian-Democrat 22 times, a Green candidate 7.2 times and a VB candidate 6.9 times.
Exclusion
Though the VB represents almost a quarter of the Flemings, its politicians receive only 7.3% of the attention of the papers during the campaign. Prof. Maddens says the VB is the victim of a “cordon médiatique” (a deliberate media exclusion). Prof. Maddens concludes that “the competitive disadvantage” resulting from the media boycott of the VB “should not be underestimated.”
While the situation in the written press is bad, it is even worse on radio and television. The Belgian state television VRT is set on damaging the VB and promoting its adversaries. The VRT frequently invites politicians to participate in its programmes, except when these are VB politicians. In the past year the Flemish Socialists were invited 190 times, the Liberals 150 times, the Christian-Democrats 140 times, the Greens (who are not represented in the federal parliament) 13 times, and VB politicians 4 times. The media have also been actively promoting Jean-Marie Dedecker, a former Liberal who broke away to start his own populist party, in the hope that he will attract VB voters. Mr. Dedecker was invited 14 times.
Banana Republic
Recent official government figures confirmed that VB received only 1.5% of the television attention for politicians in 2006-07, despite its 24.3% of the votes in the 2004 elections, compared to 43.8% of attention for Socialist politicians, despite their 19.9% of the votes.
The VB is not allowed to compete on equal terms in the election campaign, which by consequence can hardly be called democratic. We are not talking about some African banana republic here, nor about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This is Belgium, the heart of Europe, the model of the European Union.
Article in issue nº 26
Click hier to read the attachment.
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