The Data a Flemish TV Network Didn’t Want You to See

Last month, I was invited onto Flemish public television to discuss a survey on rising intolerance among young people. Before going on air, I obtained an internal presentation prepared by the broadcaster’s research department. Buried in the margins was a note that was never meant for my eyes: journalists had been instructed not to report some of the most striking findings in the dataset.

Some background. The public broadcaster of Dutch-speaking Belgium—called VRT, roughly the Flemish equivalent of the BBC—periodically conducts a survey called De Foto van Vlaanderen (“The Picture of Flanders”) to take the social temperature of the region. This year’s edition produced wall-to-wall coverage across VRT’s news outlets, centred on a set of ostensibly shocking findings about kids these days: growing intolerance of LGBT people and a resurgence of conservative values. The headline figures were certainly arresting: 17 per cent of Flemish adolescents aged 12–17, and 16 per cent of those aged 18–44, agreed that there are circumstances in which a man is permitted to hit a woman. One in three young people said they would not want a transgender person in their circle of friends.

The Manosphere?

VRT’s editorial framing, echoed by a chorus of experts and commentators, was immediate and uniform. The villain was the so-called “manosphere”: young boys falling under the spell of Andrew Tate and other social-media influencers and emulating their brand of toxic masculinity and misogyny. To discuss the findings, VRT invited me onto its main current-affairs programme, De Afspraak, alongside a sexologist.

I must admit that I was sceptical from the outset. Andrew Tate is certainly an odious figure, but the narrative surrounding the manosphere has begun to resemble a moral panic among the liberal commentariat. The data on the supposed radicalisation of young men are far less clear-cut than is often suggested. A recent analysis in The Argument, for instance, found that on every question about changing gender norms, men under 45 held more progressive views than Gen X or boomer men. To the extent that there is a widening gender gap within Gen Z, it appears to be driven by young women swinging left rather than by young men moving right.

Ignoring Religion

But what about religion—and Islam in particular—which has repeatedly been shown to exert a major influence on attitudes towards women and homosexuality, even after controlling for education and income? In VRT’s coverage, conservative religion received only a brief mention, buried deep in the article and immediately downplayed. Everyone reached for the same script about the manosphere and the generational divide.

Naturally, I asked to see the full report before going on air. I couldn’t get it. That reluctance, together with the uniformity of the narrative VRT was pushing, made me suspicious. Why invite an academic onto television to discuss a survey if you are not prepared to share the underlying data?

Eventually, a young editor sent me a brief PowerPoint presentation that had been circulating internally. To my surprise, every chart contained a bar for respondents of “foreign origin”, alongside the categories for age and education. Less surprisingly, that bar was often the highest of all. The internal presentation even drew attention to the elevated levels of intolerance among respondents of foreign origin—several times.

Then I noticed a marginal comment from a VRT editor that was clearly not intended for outside eyes.