Page 123 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience 111
prominence of empirical information about the audience, as collected by research, as both
starting point and ultimate yardstick for programming decisions.
In this respect, the strategic, central position of the term ‘quality’ in the scheme of
performance criteria above is significant. ‘Quality’ forms the formal bridge, at the level
of programming philosophy, between ‘popularity’ and ‘progressiveness’. And indeed,
while totalitarian plans such as those explicated above were dropped a few years later,
‘quality for a large audience’ has now become the pivotal benchmark, the key signifier
for VARA’s institutional identity.
Thus, VARA’s current chairman, Marcel van Dam, emphatically rejects the ‘ordinary
people’ as VARA’s target audience: ‘In the past, people did indeed say sometimes: “We
are just ordinary people”. But in our contemporary culture nobody wants to be ordinary
any more, does he?’ (in Ang and Tee 1987:18). Van Dam, a former Labour MP and an
eloquent rhetorician, is also the first leader who has proposed a radical break with
VARA’s pillarized past by renouncing any residual reference to a ‘natural constituency’:
‘No organization in the Netherlands still has a natural constituency, certainly not when
we speak about the younger generations’ (in ibid.: 19). At last, then, any essentialist, a
priori notion of the necessary belongingness of a section of the audience to VARA was
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dropped. He justifies this through a kind of postmodernist discourse, in which
contemporary culture is regarded as individualized, privatized, deideologized (Mollema
and Voskuil 1989).

In the past our aura was: when you are on the left, you ought to be a
member of VARA. That is definitely over. The people must now
appreciate you for the products you offer them…, and only then political
colour plays a role. First they want to get their money’s worth.
(in Ang and Tee 1987:19)

In this situation, Van Dam opts for VARA to be a ‘modern, independent, progressive-
humanist broadcasting organization’ who must conquer the audience by providing
‘VARA quality’. And so VARA’s institutional identity—its difference from the
competitors—has become a much more conditional question, something that must be
based upon the proven ‘quality’ of the programmes it actually transmits, rather than on a
set of pregiven ideological principles and assumptions. Thus, in a ‘product formula’
written by Van Dam to create a new, coherent philosophy for VARA’s ‘corporate
identity’ he defines the audience as:

Clients who demand quality and who want to be treated kindly and with
respect. They do not have obligations to us, but we do to them. Of course
there is in the Netherlands space for a progressive broadcasting
organization, just as there is space for progressive newspapers. But that
space must be fought for.
(Van Dam 1987:2)

While Van Dam again and again emphasizes ‘quality’, however, he at the same time
states that ‘quality is hard to define’ (in Ang and Tee 1987). Therefore, he says, it must
be operationalized in such a way that all VARA workers can agree to it: ‘Quality is that