Page 115 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience 103
chairman De Vries, a school teacher, in the 1930s evoked this affectionate image of what
VARA can do:

If you look outside, then you see everywhere in the polder little houses
and people live in them who know nothing about music and poetry and of
theatre. But now there is radio, and everything beautiful in the world will
now penetrate those little houses as well. We do a piece of educational
work, men. In a few years’ time those people will not be content with the
music and the recitations of today, then they will want better music and
more difficult radio plays. That is education.
(Quoted in Weijers 1988:116, emphasis in original)

If the reformist perspective articulated here reminds us of Reithean discourse, its origins
were, unlike BBC ideology, certainly not fed by elitist distance towards the common
people, but on the contrary by an almost sentimental love for them. This ideologically-
motivated blend of populism and paternalism—a populist paternalism, a paternalist
populism—was one way in which VARA attempted to articulate the ‘popular’ and the
‘progressive’, and it has remained a prevalent discursive motif within the organization
until well into the 1980s. Thus, a typical phrasing of this particular option for defining
VARA’s identity, made by an authoritative VARA figure, Milo Anstadt, many years
later, sounds like this:

The VARA can help to disseminate the socialist message…[But it must]
as a mass medium be prepared to accept as starting point the world of
ideas inhabited by the broad masses. To speak with Roosevelt: one has to
be one step ahead of the people; those who distance themselves more than
one step, will no longer be followed.
(Anstadt 1976:78)

That this populist/paternalist stance was not the inevitable trajectory which VARA could
have taken in defining its relationship to the audience, becomes apparent from the way it
was constantly contested inside VARA and within the larger social democratic
movement. Thus, in the 1950s, novel strands within this movement (assembled, for
example, in a renewed Labour Party), wished to modernize Dutch society by breaking the
rigid dividing lines between the traditional pillars, and by developing a unified, national
cultural politics. Proponents of this ‘breakthrough’ were generally high-minded
intellectuals who did not exhibit any affection for the culture of ordinary folks. Instead,
they emphasized the need for cultural leadership in more truly Reithean fashion, aimed at
correcting the masses from a position of aloof distance. ‘Vulgar fun’ must be replaced by
‘civilized enjoyment’, according to Professor G.van der Leeuw, who was the Dutch
Minister of Education, Arts and Sciences in 1947: ‘In the Netherlands of the new spirit, it
should no longer be possible that a child on the street has nothing decent to sing, or that
the boys and the girls who want to dance know nothing else but the newest negro
products’ (quoted in Weijers 1988:120).
Clearly, this implied a very unpopular, even antipopular idea of reform and VARA
administrators, keen on defending its acquired institutional position, responded by