Page 113 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience 101
1986). However, VARA’s position was moderate enough for it to become integrated in
the system as a whole, and VARA officials themselves considered being part of the
system so important that they accepted the prevailing rules and norms of the permittable
through forms of internal censorship (Bardoel et al. 1975). Even so, the organization was
fondly cherished by social democratic activists as a true achievement of their own—‘a
cathedral built in togetherness by hundreds of thousands of little men’ (Sluyser 1965:7).
This populist sentiment remained a major thread in VARA history, although by the 1980s
it has taken on, as we will see, a rather different form.
In the 1930s, then, VARA’s relationship to its audience was direct and reciprocal: as
part of the ‘Red Family’, it presented itself as the broadcasting organization of and for
ordinary working class people, the ‘little men and women’. Almost all listeners were also
members of the association of VARA (or at least this was the assumption, for no
systematic survey data about radio audiences were available at that time); members,
gathering together in regional districts and local chapters all over the country,
participated actively by collecting funds, organizing listening evenings and setting up
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yearly, massively attended open-air festivities; VARA’s programmes, consisting not
only of typically propagandistic material such as addresses of leaders of the Social
Democratic Workers’ Party and celebrations of the First of May, but also popular
entertainment (drawing upon and incorporating elements of existing folk culture, e.g.
through the use of well-known working class popular artists: ‘our own’ artists), were
immensely popular among the members/listeners (Weijers 1988). Contrary to Reith’s
BBC, then, which in the interwar years operated in splendid isolation from the social
world of actual audiences, VARA, as an association rather than a corporation, functioned
in that period as a powerful cement within a tightly-knit and strong-willed social
community, determined to establish the political and cultural emancipation of the
working masses. In other words, VARA could luxuriate in a position of secure
knowledge about who its audience was because it identified itself with its audience, as
becomes clear in continuous, self-evident references within the organization to its
‘natural constituency’: no fundamental gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ was perceived,
because both were imagined to be part of the same community.
This sense of unity between institution and audience was not, of course, VARA’s
idiosyncratic privilege, but was inscribed within the structure of the Dutch broadcasting
system itself. Every broadcasting organization, certainly the religious ones, relished the
certainty of having a distinct part of the nation’s population as its natural audience. The
population/audience was neatly divided in ideologically-based segments, as it were, and
each broadcasting organization presumed to cater for the cultural needs of one of those
segments. In other words, just as the system was pillarized, the audience was presumed to
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be pillarized as well. This is a reason why the need for knowledge about the audience,
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quantitative empirical style, took a long time to be felt. As De Boer and Cameron
(1955:67) noted, ‘there is a decided lack of enthusiasm in Hilversum [where Holland’s
broadcasting industry is located] for listener research. The Netherlands is a small
country…and most Dutch broadcasters feel they know their audiences well.’
However, this cosy atmosphere of oneness between broadcasting institution and
audience has never been as harmonious as it seems. This becomes clear when we take
into consideration the concrete policies VARA needed, and continues to need, to develop
the practice of broadcasting. Within VARA too, then, as within the BBC, the question of