Page 112 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 100
Netherlands, as in the rest of the Western world, the late 1960s marked the end of
postwar consensus and stability and the beginning of a rapid process of ‘depillarization’.
Today, the Dutch people no longer predominantly define themselves in terms of
exclusive membership of one of the pillars; social identifications have become much
more fluid and multiple. However, powerful remnants of the pillarized tradition still live
on, certainly at the institutional level. This is also the case for the institutional structure of
broadcasting.
When radio started to outgrow the stage of amateurism and became a mass medium in
the mid-1920s, each pillar began to set up its own broadcasting organization. There was
no legal framework for broadcasting yet at that time, and when the legal framework came
in 1930, the principle of pillarization within broadcasting triumphed over that of national
unity, and granted formal, institutional status to the then already existing, flourishing
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broadcasting associations. Each organization derived its legitimacy and identity from the
pillar to which it ‘belonged’. Each organization was given independent responsibility to
fill a fixed amount of air time with its own particular programming, although the
government determined the general rules to which all programming had to comply. Each
organization selected its personnel from inside the ranks of the pillar. Each organization
depended for its income on the number of members it attracted, and these members were
generally recruited from those considering themselves as belonging to the religious or
ideological grouping represented by the organization. Each organization directed its
programming to its own following rather than to the general public. Thus, not only radio
transmission, but also radio listening became defined in principle as a matter of
ideological commitment. And so the principle of formalized diversity, bordering on a
kind of apartheid, conceptualized in terms of a fixed set of representative currents of
thought or world views within society, was built into the very premises of the Dutch
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public service broadcasting system.
One of these organizations is VARA, the socialist broadcasting association, founded
by a group of socialist radio enthusiasts in 1925, and inspired by the example of German
workers’ radio clubs that already existed in the Weimar Republic (Swierstra 1975).
VARA had managed to acquire a full and equal position in the system, which was an
extraordinary feat in light of the then existing mood of anti-socialism and fear of the ‘red
danger’ in society at large. There was then a fundamental difference between VARA and
its catholic and orthodox-protestant counterparts, KRO and NCRV. These confessional
organizations saw broadcasting primarily as a means of strengthening their own
members’ sense of religious identity. VARA, however, defined itself as an instrument of
the social-democratic labour movement, and as such aimed at contributing to the struggle
for progressive social reform rather than merely representing and reinforcing a
philosophy of life. Against this background, VARA sought to speak for and reach all
workers, not only those of socialist conviction but also catholic or protestant ones, as its
potential members and listeners—which, of course, met with resistance from the
confessional organizations (Van den Heuvel 1976).
VARA’s rebellious and disruptive stance can be gathered from a number of
prohibitions imposed on it during the interwar years: for example, it was not allowed to
transmit the singing of the ‘International’, while anti-religious programmes were banned
as well as explicit references to class struggle and expressions of other ‘deviant’ views on
politics and morality, such as a lecture about birth control (Bardoel et al. 1975; Bank