523810
research-article2014
MCS0010.1177/0163443714523810Media, Culture & Societyvan Hulst et al.
Article
The riot, the people and the
neighbourhood: narrative
framing of social disorder in
four cases
Media, Culture & Society
2014, Vol. 36(4) 456­–472
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0163443714523810
mcs.sagepub.com
Merlijn van Hulst
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Mirjam Siesling
Tilburg University, The Netherlands
Maartje van Lieshout
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Art Dewulf
Wageningen University, The Netherlands
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.
Keywords
framing, narrative, news practices, riots, social disorder, story, storytelling
Corresponding author:
Merlijn van Hulst, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, Tilburg, 5000 LE, Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]
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van Hulst et al.
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.
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Media, Culture & Society 36(4)
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
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van Hulst et al.
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 selfreferential, 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?
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Media, Culture & Society 36(4)
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.
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van Hulst et al.
Table 1. Short chronology of riots in Utrecht.
11 March 2007
12 March 2007
13 March 2007
15 March 2007
A man is shot by a police officer
Riots take place
The neighbourhood is sealed off with high fences
A silent march takes place to commemorate the deceased
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,
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Media, Culture & Society 36(4)
Table 2. Short chronology of riots in Culemborg.
7–9 Sept. 2009
12–13 Sept. 2009
13 Sept. 2009
31 Dec. 2009–1 Jan. 2010
4 Jan. 2010
7 Jan. 2010
Two nights of disorders
Two groups clash, riot police intervene
Rivals make up at the town hall
Car runs into a young woman in her front
yard, fights break out
Neighbourhood Terweijde sealed off
Residents organize a march of reconciliation
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).
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.
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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).
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
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Table 3. Short chronology of a riot in Kiel.
24 April 2009
28 April 2009
29 April 2009
11 May 2009
Intense riots outside the Beerschot football stadium: hooligans and
migrant inhabitants of Kiel fight
Formal talks between Kiel inhabitants, police and mayor. City
government promises to cover the cost of repairing the damage
City mayor promises to adapt Football Act
First Germinal Beerschot Antwerp (GBA) football match after riots
passes peacefully
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
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Table 4. Short chronology of a riot in Anderlecht.
23 May 2008
22 June 2008
13 Nov. 2008
Violent confrontations between hooligans, migrant youngsters and
the police near metro station Sint-Guido
A ‘March of the Mothers’ is held to show a different Anderlecht
12 hooligans are arrested because of the May riots
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).
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:
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Media, Culture & Society 36(4)
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
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van Hulst et al.
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, excolonial 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
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Media, Culture & Society 36(4)
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
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van Hulst et al.
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.
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.
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Media, Culture & Society 36(4)
Notes
1.
This article builds on earlier research on newspaper articles about the riots in two Dutch cities
(van Hulst and Siesling, 2010, 2011).
2. Related pieces have appeared in Media, Culture & Society; see Kitzinger (2000) and Balch
and Balabanova (2011).
3. We treat story and narrative as synonyms, and chose to use story in this article. We distinguish
between frames and stories in the following way. Framing is the more general category. Framing
devices (Gamson and Lasch, 1983), among others stories, are more specific ‘tools’ through
which actors frame what is happening. Stories are thus a particular sort of framing device.
4. The cases were located in specific neighbourhoods in the four cities: Ondiep (Utrecht),
Terweijde (Culemborg), Kuregem (Brussels) and Kiel (Antwerp).
5. This happened in September 2000. After a Club Brugge–GBA football match, hooligans
fought. Not only GBA and Brugge supporters were involved, French and Dutch hooligans
joined the fight. A French supporter was severely injured (by a Dutch FC Groningen supporter) and 120 people were arrested (De Standaard, 19 September 2000).
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