Annelien Van Remoortere

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Political Sciences

As an integral part of their online strategies and business models, news outlets diffuse their online content on social media platforms such as Facebook to increase traffic. They thereby succumb to the contingencies and constraints of third platforms infamous for their sudden changes in algorithms. In this article, we assess engagement patterns of...

Politicians compete with each other for votes, political positions and popularity in an attempt to translate their ideological ideas into policy. Due to a lack of face-to-face interactions, voters base their vote mainly on what they see in the media. To measure the influence of media on political success during routine periods, this paper links pop...

The last few years have witnessed a growing societal and scholarly interest in the potential of online political microtargeting to affect election outcomes in favor of parties and candidates. It has often been rightly pointed out that political microtargeting can pose risks to electoral integrity in democracies. But can political microtargeting als...

Facebook remains the most important platform where social media editors package and try to ‘sell’ media outlets’ online news articles to audiences. In one of the first studies of its kind, we assess how this practice was effectuated during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use computational analysis to determine the polarity, subjectivity...

Scholarship is recognising that news diversity is jeopardised by heightened media ownership consolidation and a lack of appropriate regulatory frameworks. Using an automated quantitative content analysis of 658,493 articles published between 2018 and 2021 by two newspapers of the same recently emerged Belgian corporation that had to comply with sti...

Previous research has demonstrated that both visibility of parties, party leaders, candidates, and topics, and the sentiment of this coverage can affect people’s decision in the ballot box. Most of this research was, however, done in the period before social media gained importance which has drastically changed the media consumption of citizens. Th...

In this article, we explore the relationship between increased media market concentration and its effects on the diversity of news content. We assemble a dataset of 1,419,479 print and online 'hard news' articles published between 2018 and 2021 by the four largest newspapers in Flanders (Belgium). These include two popular and two quality titles ow...

In this paper, we outline a content analysis of 541,083 national and international news articles, all published between 2018 and 2020 in the print and online versions of the two newspapers of the biggest private media company in Flanders (Belgium). Through automated text analysis, we assess articles for their internal content overlap, which has bee...

Ample work in political communication showed that high-level politicians get more media attention than their lower ranking colleagues. With power comes media attention. More than hard work, charisma, or experience, it is the political function performed by politicians that is the crucial factor in explaining how much media attention they receive. B...

Politicians seem to be increasingly criticising the traditional news media for being biased. While scholars usually argue that politicians make such claims out of strategic concerns – they try to undermine the credibility of the potentially harmful media – it might as well be that they actually believe there is a bias in traditional news coverage....