Media on immigration in Belgium?
 

I'm writing on a colletive blog with some other people here in Sweden and our aim is to be an alternative to mainstream media and political correctness. Therefore are immigration, and especially the muslims in our country, subjects we write most about.

Many of our established media have opened up for blogs to ping their articles like Technorati. So we're commentating news so that readers of online media can see a link to our blog and then read further. We also publish alot of statistics and diagrams over immigration rates from authorities (no one read their statistics, but it's available on their homepages).

Here is a diagram I made in response to a socialist columnist who said that Sweden and Austria were breaking human rights because we were the only countries in Europe who doesn't give free helath care to illegal immigrans.


Yes, it is really this bad. We received more asylum seekers than any other country in Europe 2007. A majority of them are from Iraq...

Yesterday a girl was raped by two men behind a hamburger bar in an area where a majority of the citizens are foregin born. And trust me, there are almost none gangrapes where the rapists are of swedish decent. It is an arabic phenomenon.

Anyway, I found information from one of our biggest newspapers that the police had problems with identifieing the men and interview them because they had difficulties to speak our language.

I wrote that in our articel and pinged to another newspaper which did not have this information in their articel. And now they have removed the link to our post.

Media in Sweden NEVER write the ethnic background on criminals like they are doing in our neighbouring countries like Denmark and Norway. They doesn't even write down the description on a criminal who are wanted by the police.

An opinion poll showed that 49 % of the swedish peope wanted to have a lesser immigration of refugees to Sweden - among journalists only 11 % agreed on that. We dont have any party represented in our parliament who are critical to immigration. But now when our biggest opposition party want's to reduce the immigration the media are calling them xenophobic, right wing populists and even right wing extremists though they are not radicals.

So my questions to you belgians (and maybe also nederlanders) are like this:

- Are your journalists generally left- or right wing in values?
- Is there a widespread self cencorship in media and among politicans when it comes to immigration?
- What is the general opinion on immigration from none western countries like Middle eastern countries?

NOTE: You can write your answers in Dutch because I use an automatic translator! :-)

A recent survey performed by the UGent University among Flemish journalists indicates that they classify themselves for the most part as progressive. Something of a 75 percent. Exact numbers are still to be released. However, one should note that there are more filters that determine media output than the political orientation of journalists.

Self-censorship is hard to establish on a methodologically sound basis. However, if you look at the documents of self-regulatory organs and the public broadcaster, evidence can be found for a different way of handling information related to the backgrounds of crime in general with ethnicity as a special focus.

There is no such thing as a 'general opinion'.

- rechts , joods-liberaal

- de VLD manipuleert al jarenlang de media , zet journalisten onder druk , koopt zich in , al dan niet rechtstreeks in mediaholdings om zo het programma te bepalen ... Berlusconi toestanden

Luc Vander Kelen , HLN ..., Knack , VTM ,... Vrijheid van meningsuiting wanneer het in hun kraam past , mensen hebben niet veel keuze, één staatszender en twee commerciele zenders ...

- wij wel nog veel leiden onder racisme en discriminatie , maar hoe langer die multikul duurt, hoe meer de mensen eraan wennen , en hoe minder ze zich verzetten. Men beseft dat wij nodig zijn om de vergrijzing op te vangen.

Wij nodig om de vergrijzing op te vangen??? Dat geloof ik dus absoluut niet! De hele migratie kost ontzettend veel geld; het is een investering in mensen die vaak veel nodig hebben om zelf te kunnen functioneren in deze kennismaatschappij.Je kunt de belasing van het sociale systeem hierdoor moeilijk ontkennen; inburgering is gratis maar kost de gemeenschap geld evenals de vele vormen van gezinshereniging en vorming, extra kosten in onderwijs, opleiding en taal. Er is een hele industrie ontstaan rond migratie die ontzettend veel geld kost. De gevolgen van de vroegere 'gastarbeid' staan volgens mij niet in verhouding tot wat dit aan de gemeenschap bijdraagt dus zie ik niet in waarom dit in de toekomst anders zal worden.

En het kan best zijn dat de politiek macht heeft binnen de media; maar vergelijk dit eens met een gemiddeld moslimland; hoeveel 'eerlijke ' informatie krijgen mensen daar? Als je hier zo gediscrimineerd wordt waarom blijven mensen dan massaal komen? Juist ja; omdat je hier veel meer 'mogelijkheden' hebt via dat sociale systeem en individuele vrijheid die in het land van herkomst volslagen ontbreekt! Met dit betoog wil ik niet weggen dat ik tegen migratie ben maar kom niet leuteren over wat 'jullie' voor 'ons' doen; dat is echt de omgekeerde wereld!

Het is zo dat de kosten van de migratieoverlast niet eens berekend mogen worden door de progressieve partijen. Het kost de autochtone belastingbetalers miljarden euro's en de meerwaarde kon nooit bewezen worden. Het feit dat men uit Polen werknemers moet invoeren om knelpuntberoepen in te vullen terwijl in de 'verrijkte' Brusselse gemeenten de werkloosheid torenhoog is, zegt voldoende over het feit dat de 100.000den "Nieuwe" Belgen nooit de vergrijzing zullen opvangen maar in de sociale vangnetten zullen blijven liggen.

1. From centre left to extreme left.
2. Yes. Self-censorship to outright lies.
3. Well at least the general opinion nowadays (both amongst left and right) is that the integration is a complete failure. The difference is that while the right blames the immigrants themselves, the left and by consequence the overwhelming majority of the media prefers to blame the 'racist' locals for the failures of the immigrant communities. Another difference is that - although the left mostly admits the problems now - they do not seem to draw the logical conclusion that immigration should be curbed drastically at least untill current problems are resolved.

uwen volgenden tekst in het arabisch zeker???

1. Like most countries, it depends on which newspapers you read as to whether the journalist in question has left-wing or right-wing tendencies.

2. Official censorship? No. If there was then the extremes in the immigration debate in Belgium as a whole, represented by Vlaams Belang on one side and the Parti Socialiste (more or less) on the other, would figure much less in the media.

3. That's a general debate that's happening in much of the EU at the moment. Belgium belongs to one of the countries that restricted immigration to it from the new EU member states. So, for the moment, the country should focus slightly more on the benefits of immigration from Eastern Europe before considering immigration from outside the EU. However, the general feeling i think is that in the long term to counter the effects of an aging population (de vergrijzing) the country will have to have an intelligent (i.e. benefitting the country) attitude to immigration from outside of the EU.