Page 114 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Desperately seeking the audience 102
programming policy has always been a thorny issue and here again, the question of how
to define and establish a normative relationship with the audience through programming
is the central problem to be solved. And in this respect, VARA’s dilemmas prove to run
parallel to those of the BBC: how to adapt an essentially interventionist philosophy of
public service to the stubbornness of actual audiences.
Of course, VARA’s ideological problematic is quite different from the BBC’s. The
BBC’s national status prevents it from explicitly aligning itself with any sectional
interest. For VARA, however, the opposite is the case: its partisan identity is its very
raison d’étre; were it to become ‘neutral’ or, to use a term often employed in Dutch
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discourse on broadcasting, ‘identity-less’, then it would have lost its legitimacy. Within
VARA, then, the issue of programming policy is always, in one way or another, related to
the issue of institutional identity.
Two key terms form the general discursive framework within which VARA has
attempted to construct its identity throughout its contentious history: the twin terms
‘popular’ and ‘progressive’. It is over the meaning of these two terms, as well as the
complicated relationship between them, that VARA discourse about programming
philosophy has evolved. In general terms, VARA’s ambition has always been to be both
popular and progressive: it is through this combination that the socialist broadcasting
organization has attempted to forge its special, reformist relationship to the audience. But
how to achieve this?
VARA never wanted to restrict itself to transmitting political propaganda for the social
democratic movement. It was the idea of cultural emancipation—a cornerstone of the
general political agenda of social democracy—that formed a central lead for VARA to
develop its definition of ‘progressiveness’. Furthermore, VARA definitely wanted more
than just entertainment. As Meyer Sluyser (1965:63), one of VARA’s most passionate
early activists and champion of the interests of the ‘little man’, once noted, ‘if VARA
never wanted to be more than a pleasure machine, then it would not have been worth
setting it up. There are enough merry-makers in Holland.’ Thus, although entertainment
was even mentioned as the first obligation VARA had to meet in its first statutes in
1925—the ‘little man’ has a right to be entertained—in its cultural politics VARA opted
for the reformist idea, as in Sluyser’s words, ‘the advancement of the average standard of
general knowledge and cultural education in the country’ (ibid.). In this sense, VARA’s
philosophy was remarkably in line with the way in which the purpose of public service
broadcasting was originally defined within the BBC. The difference was that Reith’s
BBC wanted to impose audience reform ‘from above’, from an upper middle-class
perspective, while VARA’s project of reforming the audience was in a sense a voluntarist
initiative ‘from below’, from the perspective of the socialist labour movement.
The unique features of broadcasting, with its capacity to penetrate from a central point
of transmission into hitherto unreachable corners of society, propelled VARA to conceive
cultural education in terms of distribution and access: VARA’s task was to enhance the
accessibility of cultural forms to the people by distributing it to them. But distribution
and access are merely formal, not substantial goals: they remain silent about what should
be passed on to the audience. So, the ideal of cultural emancipation quickly became
translated in terms of access of working class people to more ‘serious’, established forms
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of culture, because these were considered self-evidently worthwhile. Most of all,
however, the ideal implied a first, inevitable seperation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. VARA