Abstract
This article looks at the ways newspaper articles, through their stories, frame social disorder in urban areas. The article compares reporting on four cases – two Dutch, two Belgian – of violent confrontations between societal groups and between societal groups and the police. News articles on the riots through time widen in terms of their geographic and social scale. At the same time, stories are told about a familiar cast of characters, leaving others out. The practices of newspapers seem to reinforce this pattern. The article contributes to the understanding of the role of traditional media in narrative framing of present-day public problems.
Over the last decade European societies have seen various instances of social disorder (e.g. riots and violent confrontations between groups) in their cities, for example the riots in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities in 2005 and in London and other English cities in the summer of 2011. Other countries were also confronted with comparable incidents. Administrators and policy makers often feel responsible for reacting to what is happening, as social disorder might be associated with a lack of government control and possible danger to the security of (innocent) citizens. Although what is happening is often not clear while events are taking place or even after order in the streets has been restored, a public response is publicly demanded through the various news media by commentators and spokespeople of different cultural groups.
This article looks at the ways newspaper articles frame social disorder. The article compares reporting on four cases – two Dutch, two Belgian – of violent confrontations between societal groups and between societal groups and the police. 1 We are in particular interested in how social disorder is framed by embedding it in stories. Others (Snow et al., 2007) have recently looked at the way the 2005 French riots were framed using content analysis. This article will rely on a narrative form of frame analysis to find out how social disorder is framed in news articles in four different cases, with a particular focus on how the construction of the setting of the stories positions the events in space and time, and on developments over time in the dominant stories that occur in the news articles. The article contributes to the understanding of the role of traditional media in framing of present-day social disorder in urban areas. Frame analysis has a long tradition, but research into the way stories frame public problems is still underdeveloped (Rein and Schön, 1977, 1996). In the next section we will outline our theoretical framework. Then we present and discuss our four cases and finally we formulate our conclusions.
Public problems framed through stories in news articles
The idea of framing, which finds its origins in the work of the anthropologist Bateson (1972), the sociologist Goffman (1974) and the psychologists Kahneman and Tversky (1984) has been of interest to researchers in various academic fields looking at the social construction of public problems: notably communication and media studies (Bosman and d’Haenens, 2008; D’Angelo, 2002; De Vreese, 2005; d’Haenens and De Lange, 2001; Entman, 1993; Vliegenthart and Van Zoonen, 2011), social movements studies (Benford and Snow, 2000; Snow et al., 1986), studies of public policy (Rein and Schön, 1977, 1994; Schön and Rein, 1996; van Hulst and Yanow, 2014), and conflict and negotiation studies (Levin et al., 1998; Dewulf et al., 2009). 2 We take a general conception of framing, which is shared by most researchers who write about the topic, as a starting point: framing is about focusing attention on certain aspects of reality and simultaneously ignoring others, through the selective use of words, images, metaphors and other ‘framing devices’ (Gamson and Lasch, 1983). In principle, infinite framing possibilities exist. In every context other framings are possible, depending on the actor/s and what is at stake. Nevertheless, actors are limited in their ability to frame reality differently by the cultural, social, personal, professional or organizational repertoire of interpretive lenses they have at their disposal.
Whenever the definition of the situation at hand is no longer obvious (Weick, 1995) and framing becomes an explicit activity, actors pose the basic question: What is going on here? (Goffman, 1974: 8). Framing, then, is about making a difference between what is of importance and what is not, regarding a particular issue or situation. In addition it is about connecting the selected aspects of reality, turning them into some sort of coherent whole. Framing, as Rein and Schön (1977, 1996; also, Schön and Rein, 1994; Stone, 2006) have argued, can take the form of a narrative or story. 3 A story gives an answer to the framing question. Framing can then be understood as telling stories about troublesome situations, in which the author describes what is wrong and what needs fixing. Each story conveys a particular view of reality: ‘from a problematic situation that is vague, ambiguous, and indeterminate (or rich and complex, depending on one’s frame of mind), each story selects and names different features and relations that become the ‘things’ of the story – what the story is about’ (Schön and Rein, 1994: 26). Stories, we could say, are strong framing devices.
The use of storytelling is prominent in the case of the news reporting. Journalists are taught to ask various narrative questions (cf. Kussendrager et al., 1992: 143–4): What happened? When did it happen? Where did it happen? Who was involved? Why did it happen? Newspapers are expected to produce narrative reports (Roeh, 1989). In other words, journalists are asked to write stories. As the sociologist Gamson put it (1989: 157): I begin with an assumption about the informational content of the news. Facts have no intrinsic meaning. They take on their meaning by being embedded in a frame or story line that organizes them and gives them coherence, selecting certain ones while ignoring others. Think of news as telling stories about the world rather than as presenting ‘information’, even though stories, of course, include factual elements.
In news articles events are ‘emplotted’ (Czarniawska, 2004). That is to say, various elements of reality are brought together to form a consistent or at least coherent story. The storyteller connects events (what happened and how?), settings (when and where did it happen?) and actors (who was involved?) in such a way that the reasons (why did it happen?) the events took place in the way they did become graspable. Even though storytellers are normally not offering causal explanations in the sense that many scientists attempt to do, they do often (especially if they are hired to do so, as journalists are) suggest possible explanations or point to what seems to drive events and motivate actors. As Street argued (2001: 4): Stories create causal chains: this happened because she did that, he responded by doing this. They identify notions of responsibility and blame; that make sense of the chaos of events ‘out there’, and in doing so steer the audience’s response towards one view of the world rather than another.
At the same time, newspapers have to figure out what is going on under enormous time pressure and therefore have to rely on their routines to produce the news (Gans, 1979). In an effort to create credible stories, newspapers’ accounts of society’s problems often draw on cultural repertoires of stories (Gamson, 1989; Gamson and Modigliani, 1989). This does not mean that stories in the news are reconstructing realities that do not exist. However, news article stories themselves become realities. With the idea of media logic in mind, we can also expect news articles to sensationalize and dramatize what is going on (Benson, 2004). News then can itself be an important trigger of new developments in the reality reported on. And, in addition, storytelling in the media can become self-referential, for example in the case of media-hypes (Vasterman, 2005).
Through the stories that newspapers produce society’s problems are diagnosed. But what mechanism exactly is at work here? How does the framing through stories actually play out? The use of story elements (actors, settings, events) offers many possibilities for framing problems in one way or another (van Hulst, 2012). A setting places events in a broad or narrow time frame, depending on the point where the storyteller decides to start the story. A story about a riot in a neighbourhood can be told from the moment the first brick was thrown, but it can also begin a long time before the actual riot started, for example at the moment that the local authorities did something that upset a group of residents. Recent work on ‘scale framing’ has found something very similar in how societal problems are depicted in governance processes (van Lieshout et al., 2011, 2012). By framing a situation at a certain scale – for example as a local, national or global issue – the spatial setting of the situation is defined. Actors can use the media to frame the scale of a situation such that they are situating themselves at the centre of power (Termeer and Kessener, 2007) or, on the contrary, as if they have nothing to do with it. Such framing practices are not without consequences. It makes a difference, for instance, whether a particular incident of violent social disorder is framed as local unrest or as a symptom of a threat to national security. Society’s dominant self-diagnosis tends to lead to a certain set of responses. In case of social disorder, (local) government and police forces take the news into account as they know that the news itself can become a source of unrest. Indeed, the first framing of an incident can prove to be a dominant factor throughout (Beunders and Muller, 2005). And obviously framing practices are highly contested, as actors attempt to reshape power and responsibilities (Kurtz, 2003).
Framing public problems can thus be understood as telling stories that specify a who, what, where, when and why; as such they guide both analysis and action in practical situations. They allow society’s institutions to prepare a ‘normative leap … from “is” to “ought”’ (Schön and Rein, 1994: 26), whereby different stories point towards different action strategies. The specific story of an issue that makes it to the top of the agenda will direct the kind of public intervention that can take place. Also in crisis situations, such as the violent forms of social disorder we analyse in this article, framing intervenes in determining what will count as a proper crisis response (Boin et al., 2005).
We will rely on a narrative form of frame analysis to find out how social disorder is framed in news articles in four different cases, with a particular focus on how the construction of the setting of the stories positions the events in space and time, and on developments over time in the dominant stories that occur in the news articles. More specifically, we ask how news articles frame social disorder through stories. How does the construction of the setting of the stories position the events in space and time?
Methods
To answer the question of how news articles frame social disorder through stories, we studied media coverage in the form of newspaper articles in four cases of social disorder: Utrecht (2007) and Culemborg (2009–10) in the Netherlands, and Brussels (2008) and Antwerp (2009) in Belgium.
In order to collect relevant newspaper articles we used two databases. For the Dutch cases we used Lexis-Nexis and for the Belgian cases we used Mediargus. We looked for articles using targeted search terms. We quickly learned that in all cases a combination of a characterization of the event and a specific indication of the location, that is, the neighbourhood in which the events took place, were the most useful for finding articles. 4 So the terms we used were, in the example of Utrecht: ‘Ondiep’ (the neighbourhood) and ‘riots’. We found most articles this way. This is a meaningful result in itself, since it shows that what happens gets a name in which a common label for the event (like ‘riot’) is combined with a specific location. The Belgian cases were a bit different in this respect, since the location of events remained more ambiguous in the news article stories. This is also the reason why we used more searches with different terms to gather our articles for the Belgian cases.
For the Utrecht case we used 211 unique articles in the period 11– 25 March 2007. For the Culemborg case we found 354 unique articles from the period 1 June 2009 to 30 April 2010. For the Brussels case we used 61 newspaper articles from the period 21 May to the end of December 2008 about the riots themselves. For the Antwerp case we used 30 newspaper articles from the period 25 April to 24 August 2009 about the riots. We read the selected articles several times, looking for recurring narrative elements. Based on these multiple readings, we inductively distilled the dominant stories from the articles at different points in time (starting with the first reports of the events). Subsequently we analysed the framing that these stories accomplish. The narrative analysis we apply to the news articles has been inspired by Rein and Schön’s work (1977, 1996; also, Schön and Rein, 1994) in frame analysis. We used the basic questions (who, what, where, when and why) that journalists use in their practice and that are also common in narrative research (Czarniawska, 2004). We had a particular interest in the way articles frame the setting of the events in time and space.
Below we present the four cases and the stories we distilled. The stories we present are reconstructions from multiple articles and the elements that we bring together. Even though differences between stakeholders looking at riots can be expected (Snow et al., 2007; Vliegenthart and van Zoonen, 2011: 105), in our dataset the overlap between stories in the various newspapers was much bigger than the differences. We therefore, and because of the limited space, do not discuss at length the often subtle differences between newspapers but focus on the overall stories emerging from the sets of articles.
Results
Case 1: Utrecht, Ondiep
A man is shot by a police officer on 11 March 2007 and dies of his injuries. In the days that follow many things happen that are reported in connection to the death of the man. We have chronologically listed the key events in Table 1.
Short chronology of riots in Utrecht.
From the newspaper articles we have reconstructed three separate consecutive stories: the shooting incident, the riots and the working-class neighbourhood Ondiep. The story about the shooting incident can be summarized as follows: Two police officers react to the notification of a nuisance in the Boerhaavestraat in the Utrecht neighbourhood Ondiep. When they arrive at the scene there are two men who are having a conflict with some youngsters. One of the two has a knife and comes running towards the police officer with it. The police officer pulls out his gun and shoots him. He dies on the pavement.
During the days after the shooting some details are added to the story as it is told and some elements of the story are reworded. The man who has died gets a name (Rinie Mulder) and a description: he was a loved resident of the Ondiep neighbourhood. After the cremation of the deceased two days later, not much is written about what is called a shooting incident.
Newspapers give much attention to the riots that take place on the day after the shooting and to the situation that results from the riots. The story about the riots starts with a summary of the story about the shooting: On Sunday 11 March 2007 an Ondiep resident gets shot and dies. That night the atmosphere in the neighbourhood is grim. The next night youngsters riot in the neighbourhood and cause devastation. The riot police are called in. There are rumours of ‘riot tourists’ coming from other parts of town, and from outside the city of Utrecht to fight with the police. In the days that follow the riots the neighbourhood of Ondiep is sealed off with fences. On Tuesday a large number of people are arrested.
In the second story, following statements by the mayor and the police, the neighbourhood residents are treated as the victims of the riots. That is also why the neighbourhood is sealed off, to protect them. A new actor in the second story is the mayor of Utrecht. She not only takes the side of the residents, she also accuses so-called ‘riot tourists’ regarding what happened on Monday night. The police implicitly take the role of hero, protecting the weak neighbourhood against the evil outside. Police and news reports of football hooligans coming to Utrecht support this image.
A final story that can be reconstructed is one about the neighbourhood Ondiep, the locale that functions as the setting in the other stories. Statements about the neighbourhood and characterizations of residents are all over the newspaper articles. A number of articles also focus on the neighbourhood to tell its story. The overall story goes as follows: Ondiep is a typical working-class neighbourhood whose residents have often been living there for several generations. The neighbourhood is declining, with problems of unemployment, criminality and social problems. The reconstruction of the neighbourhood, for which houses are demolished, creates unrest and makes many residents fear for the disappearance of the enjoyable (‘we all know each other’) atmosphere. There are also problems with youngsters. The riots are the next step in an escalation.
What stands out in the stories about the neighbourhood is the clear plot (the neighbourhood that declines) and the limited set of characters (the white, working-class people are the only ones who play a role). Later on, the shooting and the riots become part of a larger story about the decline of the neighbourhood. This creates space for complaints about the way local government and the police have taken care of the neighbourhood. Although the shooting incident takes place in a particular street, and the riots take place in an area of the Ondiep neighbourhood, the whole neighbourhood is used as the scale to frame what is going on and at which the public interventions should be directed.
Case 2: Culemborg
In Culemborg youngsters get into conflict in the second half of 2009 and at the beginning of 2010. The police and the riot police intervene on several occasions (see Table 2).
Short chronology of riots in Culemborg.
From the newspaper articles we have reconstructed two stories: one is about the riots (in two parts) and the second is about the neighbourhood Terweijde. We start with the story about the riots: A part of the Culemborg neighbourhood Terweijde is sealed off after disorders that lasted a few nights at the beginning of the second week of September 2009. Moroccan and Moluccan youngsters got into a fight. On the night of 12 September hundreds of youngsters from the two groups meet in the neighbourhood and get into a confrontation. The neighbourhood police officers and the riot police intervene. The next night the two young men that started the conflict shake hands in the town hall.
Over time it becomes clear that the origin of the conflict was a fight between two young men in a bar that led to various kinds of confrontations. The newspapers themselves use the terms unrest, tensions and one newspaper depicts two groups as living on the brink of war. The mayor, quoted in various newspapers, talks about a limited fight and an incident. What also stands out is the different use of labels. While the authorities talk about groups of youngsters involved, most newspapers talk about Moroccan and Moluccan youngsters. The authorities clearly tried to downplay what was going on, while the newspapers choose to use strict categories and strong metaphors to make a story out of it.
Shortly after the events, the young men who started the fight shake hands in the town hall. The interest of the newspapers in Culemborg subsides after the reconciliation has taken place. When the new year starts, however, the neighbourhood Terweijde is back in the news. Various fights take place between the same groups as in September. A lot of attention is devoted to three youngsters of Moroccan origin running into a young woman of Moluccan origin with their car. This is framed as the starting point of new hostilities. The neighbourhood is sealed off and the police and riot police are present in the neighbourhood for several days. The terminology used in the newspapers to describe the new situation has altered compared to the September articles. Various newspapers frame the new events as riots. The Telegraaf talks about a battlefield and an opinion piece in a regional newspaper uses the terms civil war and pocketsize Balkans. The descriptions often also include an ethnic dimension, for example when the terms race riots and ethnic conflict are used. The new events become the second part of the story. This also means that what looked like an end of the whole story becomes the end of the beginning of the new story. The heroic role of the local authorities, who made sure that the troublemakers made up, now becomes reframed as a failed attempt to solve the problem. As in Ondiep, a march of local residents marks the (new) end of the story.
A second story focuses on the ‘problem neighbourhood’ Terweijde: Terweijde is locally known as a problem neighbourhood in which youngsters have been causing trouble for quite a while. Also, Terweijde is known as a so-called ‘Moluccan neighbourhood’, having been exclusively assigned in the 1950s to Moluccan inhabitants. In latter decades, other inhabitants moved to Terweijde, among whom are Moroccan families. In 2004 a group of Moroccan youngsters attracted attention with their disturbing behaviour at the local fair. The local authorities promised to stop this kind of behaviour. In 2005 in total 26 of the youngsters were arrested by the police.
This part of the story about the neighbourhood is reconstructed mostly during the January conflicts in the neighbourhood. It elaborates on a description of the Moluccan aspect of the neighbourhood. Three streets in the neighbourhood are Moluccan. In the newspapers these three streets are described as the Moluccan territory that the inhabitants will defend with their lives. As in the Ondiep case, but in its own way, the second story locates the riots in a larger setting (both a deprived area and a territory) that includes certain groups with strong and rigid identities. Some time after the riots the neighbourhood is added to the official list of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the Netherlands and policy-making is intensified.
Case 3: Kiel, Antwerp
In April 2009, Antwerp hooligans and Kiel inhabitants clash and riots break out (see Table 3).
Short chronology of a riot in Kiel.
In the articles published in the days following the riots, two stories can be discerned. The first story is that of the police reaction to the riots: this reaction would have been too late. It can be summarized as follows: Around Thursday midnight some 400 drunken football fans walk into the Kiel streets, chanting anti-Islamic slogans. Hooligans clash with migrant inhabitants of Kiel and riots break out. The police are alerted, but it takes some time for them to arrive. By that time, several Kiel streets have been devastated, to the frustration of the Kiel inhabitants. The next Monday, the city mayor and the police chief constable are called to account by the city council. They explain that they were taken by surprise because they had no clue that riots were about to occur. They promise that, in future, the police will remain in the area for longer.
The core of this first story is formed by the feelings of frustration uttered by the inhabitants of Kiel, who talk about downright war, injured people and racist slogans that were shouted by the drunken supporters. According to them, the situation in their streets was very tense and violent. They felt abandoned by the authorities. In contrast to these emotions, the police reaction is characterized by the newspapers as completely surprised. Also, the newspapers state that the police initially did not interfere with the rioters. The newspapers pay a great deal of attention to the inhabitants’ feelings and opinions about the riots. Shortly after the official reaction by the city mayor and the police constable, the newspapers’ interest diminishes.
A second story, about ‘hard core’ GBA football hooligans and their troublesome behaviour, can be summarized as follows: For several years now, as a reaction to risk matches and hooligan riots, the Antwerp city government and the police apply restrictive measures against hardcore GBA supporters. There are stadium banning orders and so-called combination tickets. After the April 2009 riots, the mayor issues a new banning order: hooligans who already possess a banning order will be not only banned from the stadium itself but also from the direct vicinity of the stadium. As a consequence, they will not be able to watch the match in their favourite supporters’ pub and cause mayhem afterwards.
It is interesting to note that the newspaper articles qualify the GBA hooligans as the evident aggressors in the riots. The mayor’s reaction to the riots is revealing in this respect. He promises to look into the Football Act, to see if it can be adapted (Het Nieuwsblad, 29 April 2009). This reaction seems to be targeted only towards the GBA hooligans, leaving the other rioters (migrant youngsters) out of sight. We hardly read anything about these youngsters, although their part in the riots is uncontested. Three of the seven persons arrested were migrant youngsters. Neither do we read anything about the possible racist background of the riots: immediately after the riots the inhabitants of Kiel claim that GBA hooligans were shouting anti-Islamic slogans, which provoked a violent reaction from migrant youngsters living in Kiel. From the newspaper articles analysed, we learn that there are multicultural tensions in the city of Antwerp in general and specifically in Kiel, but this second story frames the issue as one of football hooliganism only.
Case 4: Brussels
Various events in the municipality Anderlecht (part of the city of Brussels) are reported on in the year 2008. What stands out is a conflict between two groups at the end of May (see Table 4).
Short chronology of a riot in Anderlecht.
On 23 May 2008 newspaper articles start to appear that report on a violent confrontation between hooligans and migrant youngsters. In the following days, events that follow and events that preceded this confrontation are turned into a story, which can be summarized as follows: On Friday night, 23 May, after a week of tensions, hundreds of supporters of the Anderlecht football club and immigrants had a punch-up. After a call to arms on a weblog to ‘teach the hooligans a lesson’ the football supporters and immigrants fight over the territory. The police were alerted and were present at the scene. More than 190 rioters were arrested. The damage to the area near the metro station Sint-Guido was enormous.
The first newspaper articles talk about starting small riots, a street row and the fear of racial riots in Brussels. The day after, the newspapers framed the event as a true city guerrilla action, a pitched battle and a war. Also, the framing of the actors changes from Anderlecht supporters, to white Anderlecht supporters to hooligans and skinheads, and from immigrants to North African youngsters. This continues in more reflective articles which talk about two camps, us and them and migrant youngsters versus autochthonous supporters. Later on the newspapers report that youngsters from other parts of Brussels took part in the riots. De Morgen is the first newspaper to suggest a connection with riots earlier that year in Kuregem, one of the Anderlecht neighbourhoods. At the same time, accusations of racist behaviour on the side of the police appear, since mainly young immigrants were arrested. The police defend their actions in the newspaper, claiming that the havoc was mostly created by the latter group. The last reports on the riots are in November, when 12 hooligans are arrested in connection to the riots.
Apart from a story that is told about the riots and events that surround them, articles focus on the environment in which the riots have taken place, the municipality of Anderlecht. These articles appear later in time than the articles about the riots and thus work to put preceding events in perspective. The story can be phrased as: Anderlecht is a municipality with problems. Several of its neighbourhoods are disadvantaged. Now it has also become a meeting place for rioters. A group of mothers protests against Anderlecht’s bad image.
The first articles after the riots pay attention to the people in the vicinity of the riots. A week after the riots, newspaper De Morgen (31 May 2008) asks explicit questions about the relation between the riots and the local society, especially about possible racist connotations to the riots. Two weeks after the riots, the newspaper articles focus on the municipality, discussing the suggestion that it was no coincidence that the riots took place in Anderlecht. This discussion culminates in reports about the ‘march of the mothers’ who want to show a different Anderlecht (22 June 2008). Mothers walking on the march argue that they do not want an image of Anderlecht dominated by a small group of rioters who do not even come from the area. Later on, when the newspapers look back, various incidents that have taken place in the neighbourhood converge. An article in De Standaard (5 December 2008) frames the problems of Anderlecht in terms of hopelessness, bad housing/accommodation and other social problems, and wonders if it has become safer after the riots. In the meantime the capital’s security council has made a new security plan for the years 2009–12, in which juvenile delinquency, vandalism and city gangs are put down as priorities. Furthermore, reorganization in the police zone is planned, after which prevention would become the main priority.
Discussion and conclusion
Now that we have shown through each of the stories presented above how the newspaper articles give answers to the story questions of what (happened), when (did it happen), where (did it happen), who (was involved) and why (did it happen), we will discuss the overall findings with respect to our research questions.
Changing stories over time
In general it seems to be the practice of newspapers to use an increasingly wide scope to look at what is going on. Initially, the focus is very much on the events in the immediate surroundings, while in later stories events are fitted into a larger story about the context in which they took place. If one looks closely at the way events are narrated, several steps can be reconstructed. First, events are described that have been witnessed by bystanders and first-hand by journalists. The events are given a label that attracts the attention of newspaper readers and that often – in line with media logic – dramatizes what has been going on and how things were done.
When not much that is newsworthy happens on the ‘battlefield’ any more, it is time to start telling stories about those who are involved and the wider setting in which events took place. Through background stories newspapers make the social disorder understandable by situating it in a longer time frame and a wider spatial frame. In all the four later stories in each case, the time frame is extended several years or even decades into the past, providing a historical context. In three of the four later stories the ‘neighbourhood’, and its relation to the outside world, is used as the spatial setting, while in one of the cases (Kiel) contextual information is presented about the way the city dealt with hooliganism (and how this will intensify in future). Temporal shifts in the framing of riots were pointed out by Snow et al. (2007), but they did not uncover this particular shift.
Framing the time scale: ‘the original inhabitants are the victims’
Interestingly, an important aspect of framing the time scale occurs through qualifying ‘who’ was involved and who gets depicted as aggressor and victim in the articles. In each of the cases the ‘residents’ or the ‘original inhabitants’ of the neighbourhood – a category which is of course susceptible to framing as well – tend to be depicted as victims of the riots taking place in their neighbourhood. This is somewhat less pronounced in the Culemborg case, because of the alternative framing of the events in terms of inter-ethnic conflict, but the general picture painted in the news articles is one of the earlier, ex-colonial residents (the Moluccans) being threatened by more recent Moroccan residents. The framing of aggressors is more varied, with the police and later hooligans being framed as protagonists in the Utrecht case, and Moroccans and Moluccans (in reaction to the first) in the Culemborg case.
An interesting mirror image can be observed in the Antwerp and Brussels cases. In both cases a (recurring) clash between migrant youngsters and hooligans is the central issue, but while the hooligans become depicted as primary aggressors in the Antwerp case (through reference to the chanting of provocative anti-Islam slogans and also because of the mayor’s presented solution of adapting the Football Act), migrant youngsters get most of the blame in the Brussels case (through reference to a call to arms on a website). Particularly through the background stories, the events are thus positioned in a decade-long time scale, and the people who were framed as the earlier or original inhabitants were depicted as the main victims of the social disorder.
Framing the spatial scale: ‘the neighbourhood and the outsiders’
The practice of the newspapers seems to favour news articles about ‘neighbourhoods’ and their residents, even if the connection between events and neighbourhoods is not a clear one, as we indicated above. The neighbourhood, in other words, forms a satisfying answer to the question ‘Where did it happen?’. It also brings into view an obvious set of characters: neighbourhood residents. Indeed, neighbourhood residents could be regarded as victims, if violent confrontations take place in front of their houses. A cultural story of a community that is threatened from the outside seems to be a journalistic template that works well. But, at the same time, writing about the neighbourhood and its residents establishes victimhood that has significance beyond the social disorder depicted in the news. The label ‘deprived neighbourhood’ or ‘riot neighbourhood’ is at least partly the result of (negative) attention that is given to the neighbourhood in the media. What actually happens in combination with the way what happens is framed, together change life in the neighbourhoods, for better or for worse. The neighbourhoods get a bad reputation on a national scale. Terweijde (Culemborg case) became part of a government programme for deprived neighbourhoods as a result of the events. Even if residents protest against this image and claim that many good things happen in the neighbourhood, the media attention paid to this does not necessarily change the label, as we saw with the march of the Mothers in Brussels.
There is another recurring aspect in the news articles, directly related to the framing of the spatial scale of the issue, namely the involvement of people from outside the area joining in the riots as allies of one of the sides. This is most clearly visible in the Utrecht case, where the term ‘riot tourists’ is coined to refer to hooligans from other parts of the town and the country. Also in the Brussels case it is stressed that migrant youngsters from all over the capital joined in the riot, and in the Culemborg case reference is made to the close-knit Dutch Moluccan community and the involvement of Moluccans from other parts of the country. In the Antwerp case this seems not to be clearly present, though in reports on earlier riots involving hooligans, reference is made to the involvement of foreign football supporters. 5 The inclusion of these ‘outsiders’ in the stories reframes the scale of the problem from local to national, and reinforces the storyline in which the local residents appear as victims. It also allows the police in the Ondiep case (and, to a lesser extent, in the Terweijde case) to fence off the whole neighbourhood to keep outsiders out, thereby framing the source of the trouble as coming from outside.
Over the last decade various instances of social disorder in the Netherlands and Belgium have been associated with the areas in which they took place (Van Stokkom et al., 2011). The framing of neighbourhoods as sites of contestation is no coincidence. The media might take this scale, rather than another, as their focus because neighbourhoods are recognizable social units. Such a practice is a familiar one. One sees a similar practice in headlines that express the feeling of big groups in society. What is more, local authorities (police, local government) also organize at the neighbourhood level, although this is less clear in the Belgian cases. At the same time, riots offer little opportunity to create a clear story as told by the rioters. Although this is not surprising, the news articles do not give much insight in the backgrounds, experiences and opinions of those groups. As a result, while the news highlights where some people come from, what they live through and how they evaluate events, it simultaneously ignores other people. If such insights were more readily available, the understanding of riots would probably alter. In the Utrecht case the question where the rioters came from was never properly answered, and the suggestion in the Brussels case was that the rioters were not (only) from the neighbourhood.
Stories as explanations
The remaining narrative question is surely the hardest: why do the things happen the way they do? For each of the four cases, if we look at the way the stories are related to one another in the newspapers, it is interesting to notice that the connections that are made are not based on clear causal argumentations. Why things happened as they did is hardly answered in any explicit way. However, through framing the victims, assigning blame, providing historical context, or putting forward relevant actions or policies, the normative implications of what happened are shaped. The ambiguity inherent to stories in the news (Edelman, 1988) allows the reader to fill in the blanks. Although we did not study this in depth, it is interesting to notice that in the three cases where the focus is put strongly on the neighbourhood, the proposed actions or policies are targeted on the neighbourhood, while in the case where the focus is strongly on the legacy of hooliganism, the proposed action is a change to the Football Act. At the same time, we might wonder whether new types of social disorder will also bring about cultural stories into which riots can be fitted.
Towards new questions
In this article we looked at framing through stories. This is just one aspect of the way societies construct and deal with their problems. Society’s problems and the solutions to those problems are the result of complicated and intertwined processes of agenda setting, societal and political debate and public policy-making. The framing of what is going on and what should be done is an integral part of those processes (Schön and Rein, 1994). Texts produced by newspapers are important in this process. They emplot what is going on. Newspapers have a set of practices to deal with the everyday demands of their work (Gans, 1979). Social disorder, and especially the more violent type that goes by the name of ‘riot’, is a phenomenon that readers are interested in. Riots worry the ordinary newspaper readers and easily catch their attention. But after riots are over, how are readers being served? Our research shows that part of the practices newspapers have developed consist of locating problems in a specific area and introducing a cast of characters who fit in a story about a neighbourhood. One could ask what it would take for newspapers to start writing about riots without the almost instant focus on the physical and social location that carries the label ‘neighbourhood’. Perhaps journalists and local authorities in the epoch of social media have already altered their practices in order to bring the social network into view. Perhaps a different (kind of) scale could be brought to bear upon the problem. Some articles we encountered do scale up the problems to city or even the societal level, but the problem is that newspapers themselves seem hardly equipped (in training, time available, etc.) to research this level. This final observation brings us to new questions: How do the ways of framing we encountered come about in the practice of media agencies? Another question takes us beyond the newsroom: Is there a difference between the framing in newspapers and other media? What new cultural stories have developed over the last ten years regarding social disorder? These questions not only demand new material, they also might best be answered with the help of other research strategies like (online) ethnography. Answering these questions will help us to further unravel the narrative aspect of the way social disorder is framed in the media.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Imrat Verhoeven for his comments on a previous version of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.