Media Consolidation and News Content Diversity: A Deductive Framing Analysis of Belgian Refugee News Coverage

Growing groups of scholars express fears that rising media ownership consolidation negatively affects news content diversity. Existing research has mainly focused on quantitative studies, thereby somewhat neglecting the qualitative component. To fill this gap in scholarship, we combine news content homogeneity studies with framing analysis to assess how discourse in reporting related to the refugee crisis changed across four newspapers from Belgium (Flanders) between 2010, 2015 and 2020, a time during which they all underwent major ownership changes. Our findings suggest limited effects of ownership concentration on frames and discourse, indicating a more nuanced picture among alarmist findings. We do argue, however, that media concentration and the increased collaborations between newsrooms of the same parent company can do more harm than good. We position our findings within the specificalities of the Flemish media market as well as international research, both from a news (content) diversity and a framing studies vantage point.