Framed in Times of Democratization. How Belgian Diplomats Reacted to their Press Representation in the Early Twentieth Century (original) (raw)
Media History, 2020
This essay investigates how before, during, and after the First World War, diplomats were depicted in newspapers, and how they perceived and reacted to these representations. Focusing on the case of Belgium, it looks, on the one hand, at the occurrence and/or co-existence of certain frames used by journalists to stereotype diplomats, and evaluates how changes in Belgian foreign policy and European politics altered framing strategies throughout this period. On the other hand, it sheds light on how diplomats coped with the penetration of the mass media into their professional space, which forced them to reckon with changing media logics in this age of accelerating democratization.
'Please Deny these Manifestly False Reports': Ottoman Diplomats and the Press in Belgium (1850-1914)
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2016
Similar to ruling elites in Western Europe, the Ottomans were preoccupied with foreign “public opinion” regarding their state. While historians have devoted attention to Ottoman state efforts at image building abroad and, to a lesser degree, related attempts to influence the European mass press, an in-depth study of this subject is lacking. This article turns to one of the prime, though largely neglected, actors in Ottoman foreign policy making: the sultan's diplomats. Through a case study of Ottoman envoys to Belgium, it demonstrates how foreign “press management” evolved and was adapted to shifting domestic and international political circumstances. Increasingly systematic attempts to influence Belgian newspapers can be discerned from the reign of Abdülhamid II onward. Brokers between Istanbul and “liberal” Belgium's thriving newspaper business, Ottoman diplomats proved essential to this development. Ultimately, however, Ottoman efforts to counter European news coverage of the empire had little impact and occasionally even worked counterproductively, generating the very Orientalist images they aimed to combat in the first place.
European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire, 2018
Scholarship on media and politics presumes a ‘mediatization’ of politics over time, which overlooks the evolution of a mediatized public sphere that shaped people’s understandings of what actually constituted politics. This article investigates the public sphere to demonstrate how it created expectations for politicians and journalists within the process of the mediatization of politics. To understand how political behaviour changed as a result of mediatization, this article focuses on the turn of the twentieth century, when politics faced an emerging mass press. It analyses one of the most violent episodes of the ‘press wars’ between Germany and Britain before the First World War. In 1901, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain allegedly insulted the German Army, to which German Imperial Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow reacted aggressively, resulting in a media storm across Europe and the failing of the British-German alliance talks that paved the way for Britain’s Entente Cordiale with France. Part of the reason why this situation escalated was that newspapers in Britain and Germany expressed expectations for politicians to represent the angry opinions of their publics as voiced in the press. However, many newspapers also demanded that Bülow and Chamberlain moderate public opinion by influencing and censoring the press. While Bülow and Chamberlain were ahead of their time in paying attention to press opinions, seeking publicity and managing the press, they failed to meet the contradictory expectations of catering to jingoism while appeasing a foreign public. Meanwhile, newspapers reflected on their political impact on this situation, and started expecting more press responsibility, which moderated the crisis. The case shows how media and politics were not separated spheres, but interacted within a transnational public sphere in which expectations for political and journalistic behaviour were continuously being (re)shaped.
2014
per cent. Moreover, after ten years of seniority, many young diplomats already received as much as the top bureaucrats in the ministerial departments. 97 Keeping this in mind, Marguerite's reaction is -at first sight -remarkable: she simply wrote that "I do not see any advantage, quite the contrary". However, counting an uncle and two cousins in Belgian diplomacy, and having seen in London with her own eyes what diplomatic life was like, Kerchove's young wife knew perfectly well what distinguished the diplomatic career from other professions in the civil service. She knew that the price of a diplomatic career far exceeded the sum of a diplomat's salaries. 98 To uphold their country's prestige, but also to avoid losing face towards foreign colleagues, senior diplomats lavishly decorated their legations and threw sumptuous dinner parties, while younger diplomats appeared dressed to the height of fashion in clubs and salons, at theatres and balls, and in many other places where they could be seen spending money. 99 Thus, the generous salaries diplomats received were completely swallowed up by the conspicuous consumption that was an essential part of the job. Throughout the nineteenth century, the expenses for representation provided by the government were mere trifles. Consequently, the Foreign Minister was regularly deluged with complaints of insufficient allowances. These mostly came from younger diplomats. Because only a limited number of junior postings were salaried, they had to wait for many years before receiving their first salary. In the 1860s, one of the thriftier Belgian diplomats calculated that twenty years of foreign postings had cost him more than twice what he had received. No wonder, then, that the career ambitions of less prosperous diplomats were often crippled. 100 The luckier ones had to exert all their diplomatic talents to convince their parents to keep sending them money. An attaché to the Belgian legation in Berlin in the late 1880s, Conrad de Buisseret-Steenbecque de Blarenghien sent his parents monthly overviews of his expenses. His first month, he calculated, cost his parents almost four hundred German marks,
In this article I aim to understand the structuring effects of the institutional and social context on journalist-politician interactions in Germany. In particular, this article focuses on different informal relations within political information circles and, more specifically, on the “off-the-record” practice. Bringing in some exploratory comparative results from France, I propose a sociological model of analysis of these practices.It requires observing and analyzing the complex interplay between political communication and journalism practices in political institutions. At the same time, these interactions have to be understood through their long-term transformations. The traditional explicative variable used by scholars—the effect of a national democratic culture as more or less respectful of journalists’ independence—has to be deconstructed. I propose here a historical sociology of political communication in Western democracies. My study focuses on the (West) German case, understanding the structure of the interactionsin their continuity (from the Weimar Republic to the postwar Bundesrepublik).This example of German journalism is probably a limited case.
Press/Journalism (Belgium) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)
2017
The Belgian press world was turned upside down by the German occupation. Most of the editorial offices of the news dailies ceased all activity or went abroad. Yet a press under censorship did continue to appear when the Germans set up a “Pressezentrale”' in 1915. This censored press underwent major transformations: Belgians were not dupes but wanted information at all costs. Meanwhile an underground press was established, of which La Libre Belgique was the most prestigious example. The Belgian newspapers in unoccupied Belgium disseminated a very patriotic discourse, particularly the French-speaking ones. This discourse had the effect of reawakening a Flemish press at the Front that was especially active in the trenches. Yet only a minority of the press was seduced by the German Flamenpolitik. On the Walloon side, a protest press appeared. By the end of the war, the dominant discourse was ultra-patriotic and stressed the role played by journalists themselves. Starting in the 1930...