Page 111 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the
natural audience

The Dutch broadcasting system, like the British, is essentially based upon the assumption
that broadcasting should be a question of public service. However, its philosophical and
organizational foundations differ considerably from the British emphasis on national
broadcasting, as embodied by the BBC. The nationalist principle has never succeeded in
becoming the prevailing organizational force in Dutch broadcasting. Since its inception,
it has been based upon a very different set of loyalties and commitments. To be sure,
attempts to found a national, monopolistic, BBC-like broadcasting organization were
undertaken, both in the very beginning of radio (early 1920s) and after the Second World
War, but several social, cultural and political forces, which need not be explicated here,
have led to the emergence and institutional consolidation of a broadcasting system in the
Netherlands which is unique in the world, and which has come to be known as a system
of ‘pillarization’ (Van den Heuvel 1976). In an early article which aimed to explain the
Dutch system to foreigners, for example, it was characterized by the authors as a ‘third
way’ of regulating broadcasting, alongside the American commercial system and the
British national monopoly system (De Boer and Cameron 1955).
As a regulatory principle, pillarization was not restricted to broadcasting, but extended
to the structuring of almost all facets of organized activity within Dutch society,
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including party politics, schooling, trade unionism and the press. At the heart of the
principle of pillarization was the idea that Dutch society was divided into so-called
pillars, that is, social groups separated from each other not along class lines, but along the
lines of religious or ideological convictions. Emanating from this idea was a corporatist
social system with a high degree of vertical oneness and solidarity, thus unifying leaders
and followers, elite and mass, middle class and working class, within each pillar. While
the catholics and the protestants formed the most well-organized pillars (and were the
most active proponents of a pillarized society), they were complemented by the liberals
and the socialists, leading to four main pillars formally recognized as such. There were,
then, catholic, protestant and socialist political parties, trade unions, youth clubs, schools,
universities, women’s organizations, housing corporations, hospitals, welfare
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organizations, newspapers, sporting clubs, and so on. All believers were officially
summoned to cluster themselves within these pillarized organizations. The system was
functional insofar as it promoted peaceful co-existence and cooperation between the
diverse pillars, and effectively neutralized the disruptive effects of class conflict and class
struggle, because it divided the population up along the lines of value systems rather than
economic interests. The system operated under the condition of obedience, real and
3
perceived, of the rank and file.
Historians usually designate the period between the end of the First World War and
the mid-1960s as the high tide of pillarization in Dutch politics and culture; in the