To foreignize or to domesticate? How media vary cross-nationally in their degrees of incorporating foreign events

• Published in: Journalism (London, England) England), 2025-01, Vol.26 (1), p.108-127
• Main Authors: van Dooremalen, Thijs, Duyvendak, Jan Willem
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1464-8849; 1741-3001
• DOI: 10.1177/14648849231223576

While the domestication literature indicates how national media link foreign events to a country’s domestic affairs, it has thus far only examined modes of domestication - the ways through which these links are created. In this article, we introduce a different dimension of the phenomenon: degrees of domestication. This includes the extents to which a foreign event gets connected with the domestic. By making a topic-modeling analysis of French and Dutch newspaper articles about 9/11, the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, the Arab Spring and Donald Trump’s political rise, we provide an explorative case study of this dimension. We inductively arrive at a scale ranging from no to extreme domestication of the event, classified according to four degrees of domestication: (1) an entirely foreign affair; (2) a foreign political affair involving domestic actors; (3) a domestic political affair; (4) or a personal disruption. French newspapers score higher on the second degree, the Dutch ones on the third and fourth. A deepening of this pattern shows how these differences stem from two distinctive cultural repertoires that journalists and other media participants employ when relating to foreign events: a French one, which sees them as an opportunity to dominate the international political stage, and a Dutch one, which considers them a reason for reflecting on domestic or personal matters. These clear differences indicate the concept’s importance for the literature and for investigating it within other national media contexts.