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Diversity of Journalisms. Proceedings of ECREA/CICOM Conference, Pamplona, 4-5 July 2011
the governments and their representatives were central actors. Therefore the finding of
the prevalence of the attribution of responsibility in the newspaper articles coincides
with this reform process.
This study provides the first impressions for further study of the coverage on relations
in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. As limitations, the sample construction of two
weeks per year resulted for this study in a small sample for the Dutch newspaper NRC
(14 articles) which may have resulted in the frequent use of the human interest frame.
This might have to do with the characteristics of the employed correspondents that
cover relations in the Kingdom In NRC for example four out of the 14 articles are
written by a journalist from Dutch origin living in Curaçao.
Further study will also include newspapers in the local language Papiamento from
Aruba and Curaçao next to the four newspapers in Dutch, to complement the rather
‘elite’ and Dutch oriented newspaper Amigoe. This will probably result in a different use
of frames.
In addition, this study focused on the changing relations between Curaçao and the
Netherlands, in regard to the reform of the Netherlands Antilles, but did not include the
consequences and the received media coverage for the other 4 islands Saint Martin,
Saint Eustatius, Saba and Bonaire. Saint Martin became an independent country in the
Kingdom of the Netherlands, like Curaçao, but other three islands were integrated in
the Netherlands as special municipalities. Studying the other reform-processes may
well produce different results in the use of news frames.
By looking not only at the generic frames from Semetko and Valkenburg, but also
including the use of a relational dimension, cues, as Kitzinger describes them, resonate
a transactional or co-operational dimension of relationships in the Kingdom, especially
between the islands of Aruba and Curacao and for example Surinam. Further research
needs to be conducted to see if this maybe could be a specific frame for Kingdomrelations.
In small societies like Aruba and Curaçao with commercial media landscapes, a
scarcity in trained journalists, demands and the proximity of advertisers and politicians
and developments of technologies and new media, newspapers experience maybe
more direct influences than the bigger and more varied media landscape in the
Netherlands. Therefore further research needs to also involve production and media
use perspectives.
Overall, this study aims to offer the first systematic review of the use of news frames in
regard to relations in the Kingdom of the Netherlands and emphasizes the mere
existence of frames in Aruban, Curaçaoan and Dutch newspapers. Future research will
focus on the contextual characteristics of the three countries, the specifics of the
newspaper discourse and the journalistic surroundings to gain additional insights into
the specific conditions under which frames emerge.
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