PUBLIC SERVICE TELEVISION'S DIFFERENT WAYS OF DEALING WITH A CHANGED MEDIA LANDSCAPE: A COMPARISON OF PRE-ELECTION PROGRAM FORMATS ON DUTCH-SPEAKING AND FRENCH-SPEAKING BELGIAN PUBLIC TELEVISION

Under the influence of a changing international media landscape, political programming on public service television has changed considerably since the beginning of the 1990s. Political television debates and interviews increasingly take place within hybrid program formats, in which traditional stylistic boundaries are challenged. This article focuses on the Belgian example and analyses how two Belgian public service broadcasters, the Dutch-speaking Vlaamse Radio-en Televisieomroep (VRT) and the French-speaking Radio-Télévision Belge de la Communauté fran aise (RTBF), covered the 2009 European and regional election campaign in terms of presentation and format strategies. Using a qualitative format analysis, the article identifies a number of similarities and differences at the levels of (1) program formats, (2) representation of the public and (3) the role of television journalists. Whilst both public service broadcasters produced their 2009 pre-election broadcasts in modern formats, the VRT election programs were more strongly formatted in terms of alternation, fragmentation and use of pre-produced materials than the RTBF programs which were predominantly based on rather traditional debate formats.