Page 119 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience 107
television (Ang 1985b). And so, concern with the necessity of fighting for the audience
entered VARA discourse.
In fact, it had been clear for a long time that many viewers and listeners did not
behave in the loyal and obedient manner that the pillarized system expected them to do.
For example, as early as 1954, the very first representative survey among Dutch radio
listeners provided data that audiences were rather independent in their programme
choice: the socialists, catholics and protestants certainly did not listen only to the
programmes of their ‘own’ broadcasting organization, but also to the others (Centraal
Bureau voor de Statistiek 1954). Almost a decade later, similar conclusions were drawn
about the television audience (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek 1962). Thus, the
audience was never so neatly segmented along the pillarized lines as the system
presumed: the pillarized audience was more a convenient fiction than a social fact. In
fact, awareness of this can be illustrated by a prohibition the episcopate imposed upon its
Roman Catholic following, in 1954, to become members of the ‘red’ VARA or even
listen to or watch its programmes—a disciplinary rule that was bound to be subverted!
The broadcasting organizations were aware that the fiction of the pillarized audience
was based on shaky ground, and this was one of the reasons why they took the initiative
to set up an audience research service, which began to operate in 1965. But as long as the
established broadcasting organizations formed a closed oligopoly, competition was not
really an issue. There was a kind of implicit ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ built into the
system to live and let live: a situation of peaceful coexistence. This comfortable situation
was cruelly disturbed by the advent of TROS, and later even more by yet another
‘Americanized’ organization, Veronica, a former pirate pop music station, which entered
the system in 1976. These new organizations aggressively drained many viewers off from
the ideologically-based organizations, and effectively blew up the idea of the loyal,
pillarized audience.
VARA was fully aware of the problems these developments raised. Typically enough,
then, VARA management commissioned market research firms to explore its position in
the audience ‘market’. These surveys provided VARA with disturbing empirical
knowledge: for example, that many people who voted for the Labour Party preferred to
be members of TROS not VARA, and that young people were much less attracted to
VARA than the older generation—something which, so the report concluded, did not
predict a rosy future for VARA (De Hond 1977a; 1977b).
But the idea of the ‘natural constituency’ was so deeply inscribed in VARA’s
assumptive world that it was difficult for VARA to adapt to the new situation. Instead, it
preferred to cherish the thought that there was still a part of the audience, defined in the
1970s and early 1980s either in political terms (‘left-voting Netherlands’), or in politico-
demographical terms (‘the people with less power, knowledge and income’), that should
rightfully and automatically ‘belong’ to VARA’s natural audience. The observation that
VARA did not occupy a spontaneous ‘warm spot in the heart’ (De Hond 1977b) of these
groups was implicitly interpreted as their ‘false consciousness’!
How much resistance there was within the organization to give up the idea of the
‘natural constituency’, becomes clear in the following diagnosis, made by a business
consultant in the early 1980s: