No newsroom of a Flemish leading news outlet is open to the public at any given time: all meetings and decisions are taken behind the scenes by editors and journalists themselves. Some media have SMS services or online tools to allow citizens to send in news or press releases, but there is no structured medium or mode for citizen-fostered journalism. Some smaller, online-only news media offer opportunities for viewers to send in articles and opinion pieces, which may or may not be eventually published. They consider this to be valuable acquisitions to their small workforces as a means to receive free content for publication.
The right of citizens to reply to any given news article is not enshrined in the aforementioned Code of Practice of the Council for Journalism. The right of rebuttal is mentioned in Section III, Article 20, which explicitly states that “the journalist offers the other party the option of a fair hearing when his reporting makes serious accusations that may damage the honour and reputation of that party” (Rvdj, 2010a).
Commenting is not possible on most news websites, nor are there active online-news forums. A sole exception is the website of tabloid newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, which also happens to be Flanders’s largest news website. Its comments section has infamously spawned its own designated social media accounts mocking them, due to the frequent appearances of racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic remarks. All legacy news media do offer the possibility of commenting on articles through Facebook, which helps them gain more traction and awareness for their brand online, but due to shortages of staff, and mostly time, in no cases did interviewees report systematically scanning incoming comments, only hiding or removing comments in exceptional cases where “too overtly presented hatred” was seen. This has to do with limited resources as well as priority-setting, and might need more attention; potentially, new technological developments regarding artificial intelligence could help here too.
