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A new argument in the deregulation debate: The BRT and its objectivity obligations - The BRT (Belgian Radio and Television), which is a public broadcasting corporation, has often been criticized for its non-objective news reporting. Quite recently this has been used as a strong argument in the deregulation-debate. Therefore a systematic investigation of radio and television news reporting was undertaken. Starting from the WESTERSTAHL—model the ,,impartiality—neutral presentation”—obligation was examined. To measure this neutral presentation the radio and television language in the major news broadcastings of both BRT (BRT: covering the Flemish part of Belgium) and RTBF (RTBF : covering the French speaking part of Belgium) radio and television was compared with the language used in news reports of 12 major newspapers. Using the evaluative assertion analysis (OSGOOD) 17 topics were evaluated for a month. The results of this examination are encouraging : while the newspapers score high on the evaluative scale, which is quite natural in connection with an „opinion” press, the language used in the news reports of the public corporations is very neutral. Another pattern that was discovered is that the language in the television news is regarded as being more neutral than the one used in radio news. The testing of the criterion of objectivity was also completed by an interest-theory. The interest-governed perspective was that as the RTBF’s recruitment policy is more politicised than the BRT’s this could also have repercussions on the RTBF-news coverage concerning the major political party of Wallonia : the P.S. (Parti Socialiste). In the French radio and television-reports on the P.S. (Parti Socialiste) the language used was less neutral than the language relating to other news items. As some politicians wanted to introduce the same selection criteria in Flanders the repercussion of such a policy was tested by an extrapolation and gave less neutral news language. Other arguments in favour of deregulation are mentioned and briefly discussed. However, this article may not be seen as a plea against deregulation. Only one argument, that has frequently been used recently, was examined more thoroughly and evaluated as inadequate.
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How to Cite: Fordyn, A. (1984) “Een nieuw argument in het dereguleringsdebat: komt de BRT zijn objectiviteitsverplichting na?”, Tijdschrift voor Sociale Wetenschappen. 29(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/tvsw.94881