Page 117 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience 105
more detached, anti-establishment attitude better suited to the ambition of editorial
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autonomy that went along with the values of professionalism. And by aiming at
shocking the audience their programmes were decidedly antipopular. In a fundamental
sense, then, these provocative programmes represented a profound break with VARA’s
dominant, populist/paternalist relationship to its audience. They never became a major
programming strand, however, precisely because they disrupted VARA philosophy too
much (Pennings 1985a).
In the early 1970s, another group of programme makers, gathered within the
Documentaries Division, put forward an even more radical programming philosophy,
which aimed at restoring the tight and close affiliation with the audience. They opted for
a reinvigoration of VARA’s socialist credentials, and demanded an explicit, sectional,
Marxist-inspired commitment to the plight of the working class within capitalist society.
Between 1972 and 1974, this group produced a series of documentaries, titled Van
Onderen (From Down-under), which typically featured the exploitation and oppression
of workers in large capitalist corporations. This programme strategy was interventionist
with a vengeance. Its presumed effect on its audience was far-reaching: it was hoped that
the programmes would induce not only the raising of (class) consciousness, but also a
sense of solidarity and, eventually, active struggle for social change. It must be clear then
that these programmes were not directed to a general public, but to a very specific,
politically defined target group: the oppressed (Bardoel et al. 1975; Pennings 1985b).
The programmatic experiments of the 1960s and 1970s were carried out and defended
by their proponents, inside and outside VARA, with zealous passion. These were the
times of intense commitment to radical visions of ‘progressiveness’ (Ang 1987).
Especially in the 1970s, the interventionist ambitions built into VARA’s particular
version of the public service idea were pushed to an extreme by the experimentalists: a
truly socialist VARA, so it was proposed, should use television as an instrument of
political mobilization. The audience’s role should not be limited to that of (responsive)
viewers; they should also be active participants in the production of the programmes, for
example by organizing discussion groups about the programmes and by using their
comments as starting point for the next programme—a procedure, therefore, that went
radically beyond the conventional arrangement of broadcasting as a one-way process of
central transmission and privatised reception. This heavily politicized concept of what it
means to serve the public, which echoes Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s (1979 [1969])
influential theory of the ‘emancipatory’ (as opposed to ‘repressive’) use of the media,
was, according to Tom Pauka (1974), leader of this group of radical programme makers,
populist but not popular: it did not aim to attract large audiences (which indeed it never
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did), but resolutely took the side of the victims of an unjust society.
I have described these programming experiments here to illustrate some of the daring
efforts that were made within VARA to modernize its normative relationship to the
audience. In one sense, these experiments were possible because there was little
consensus within the organization in the 1960s and 1970s about what that relationship
should look like now that the organic social-democratic community, which VARA
considered the basis of its institutional identity, has fallen apart. In other words, VARA
did not know how to modernize itself. But the experimental mood never caught on in
VARA as a whole: in fact, it only existed at the margins of mainstream VARA policy,
and the reason for this can ultimately be found in the impossibility for VARA to move