Why I read the Flemish press

With its backwardness and paternalism, Belgium's francophone media has lost it way

I used to have a soft spot for Brussels newspaper La Capitale, which regularly churned out great, original stories about the city where I lived.

Sadly, the title and the group (Sudpresse) have struggled to adapt to the online market, and quality has declined.

Like other titles across francophone Belgium, editors and owners clearly sought to delay the inevitable switch for as long as possible, and then a little longer. I used to read online stories that ended: “If you want to know more, buy the newspaper!” The fact that media is heavily subsidised in Belgium hardly encourages change; it can act as a break on innovation.

Unsurprisingly, by the time these titles went online, they were already towards the back of the pack. Brussels and Wallonia are Facebook territory, and many local groups have stepped in to fill the news void.

In Flanders, the picture is different. Publishing groups in Belgium’s Dutch-speaking half have been keener to move with the times, and the reward has been loads of money.

Groups such as Mediahuis have had so much spare cash that they have splashed out on acquisitions abroad. Mediahuis bought Ireland’s largest publishing group, Independent News and Media, in 2019, and has more recently been sniffing around The Telegraph in the UK, which is (still) for sale.

You can smell the money when you visit the website of HLN.be, the premier tabloid title in Flanders. It publishes reams of news and celebrity gossip along with photos galore. Their sales team (I’m a subscriber) is efficient, and their editorials have impact.

As a result of the above, I mostly get my Belgian news from Flemish websites nowadays (I also subscribe to Het Nieuwsblad). There’s just more of it, and they can afford to send journalists out to cover stories.

While Flemish media obviously has its biases (strangely, they seem to have become more friendly to Belgium’s Royal Family of late) they’re not overly keen on censorship, which also makes them stand out from their paternalistic francophone compatriots.

French-speaking news channel RTBF (confusingly, the ‘F’ comes from Communauté Française, not francophone) actually delayed broadcasting the inauguration speech of US President Trump because editors first wanted to parse it for “racism and xenophobia”. The channel clearly thinks it viewers are too stupid to make up their own minds.

The picture is of course more complicated than described above. Brussels remains a linguistic battleground, and Dutch-language websites such as Bruzz have also made inroads, as have English-language titles such as the Brussels Times.

Nevertheless, the differing fortunes of Belgium’s francophone and Dutch-language titles remain, in my opinion, a good example of the maxim I’ve just invented: the private sector does news better. Financial independence helps to protect you from the censor.

And if you don’t follow your readers in their desires and habits, irrelevance beckons.

Note: artwork used to accompany these articles on Substack is mine. Some of it features in my book ‘This Is Belgium’. The above painting is the Bourgeois Square in Rixensart.