Racism versus Democracy

The Zwarte Piet issue has become very salient in the Netherlands. How news media reported on the issue has for a large part determined the course of public debate surrounding Zwarte Piet. To explore the relations between gatewatching, agenda setting, and framing, the issue is approached as a case. In the public sphere, journalists normally inform the public about pertinent issues. Through agenda setting, they control the public agenda at first and second level and trough framing, they control the course of public opinion formation. They determined how the Dutch people understand and think about the Zwarte Piet issue. The emergence of web 2.0 and gatewatching brought a shift in that paradigm: commenters can frame an issue their way and differences can arise between journalist framing and commenter framing, affecting the public agenda. A case study of two Dutch online news sources, RTL Nieuws and Nu.nl, was conducted to research that process empirically. The objective was to identify how journalists and how commenters framed the Zwarte Piet issue. Theoretical sampling was done to gather articles and related comments (N=104) and framing analysis was used to analyze the material. The analysis involved detecting framing and reasoning devices and was performed using the computer program NVivo. To measure how operative each frame is, the number of framing devices was counted. Based on the frames and their operativeness the framing strategies of journalists and commenters were identified. In total, twelve frames were found: Children, Unfairness, Proponents vs. Opponents, Majority vs. Minority, Ridiculous, Serious, Threat from Outside, Color, Racism, Not Racism, Change, and Tradition/Heritage. The journalists framed the issue as serious and involving racism. In the framing done by commenters the issue does not involve racism and involves much unfairness towards the Dutch people. The framing strategy of each group was exactly the same at both news sources. Their strategies were not only different, but oppositional. Proponents vs. Opponents was the only frame journalists and commenters shared. Children, Unfairness, Majority vs. Minority, Ridiculous, Threat from Outside, Not Racism, and Tradition/Heritage were commenter frames and Serious, Color, Racism, and Change were journalist frames. The cases formed a good example of multiperspectival news, encompassing fact and opinion. Although the journalists were counter-framed and the issue was reframed by commenters, the journalists did not change their own framing strategy over time. It is argued that through gatewatching, journalists lose their agenda setting power at the second level, but they can gain agenda setting power at the first level if they conduct a certain gatekeeping policy or framing strategy.