The construction of imagined communities in Luxembourgish (mass-)media: audience design at RTL Luxembourg

As the most influential agent in the Luxembourgish media landscape, RTL represents one of the main sources of daily news in Luxembourg. In order to gather a relevant amount of data, an automated script was programmed which accessed RTL’s separate websites in different languages and automatically downloaded the contents of the “national news” category multiple times a day. The final dataset consisted of more than 9500 news articles (including duplicates) and allowed to perform a thorough quantitative analysis which then lead the way to a qualitative investigation on a macro level (discourse analysis). Analysing the news outlet’s practices in audience design returned evidence on the construction of imagined communities at RTL Luxembourg, which implied negatively connotated and stereotyped perspectives.