For historical and economic reasons, all newspapers were published in French during the first decades of Belgian statehood (the country gained its independence in 1830, officially ratified in 1839), despite the fact that French was the country’s minority language. The first Dutch-language daily newspaper in Belgium appeared in 1844. In the last decades of the 19th century, with the rise of mass media, several other Dutch-language daily newspapers were founded. In light of both linguistic and ideological sensitivities, the selection of serial stories translated in the newspapers was neither culturally, nor politically, neutral. This case study compares the translated prose selected by three Flemish newspapers, one in 1844 and two at the end of the 19th century. The results show important differences on both culturo-historical and politico-ideological grounds. The mechanisms of text selection and de-selection can be seen as a form of prior censorship that is source-nation or source-language based. Together, polysystem theory and imagology offer a valuable theoretical framework for this intersection of censorship, translation and ideology.