Page 125 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience 113
reform the audience in any direct sense; rather, the professional discourse of quality
functions primarily as a defence mechanism in that it theoretically constructs a favourable
image of what the public institution has to offer to the consuming audience, even though
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it is difficult to determine ‘quality’ in practice.
All this does not mean, of course, that VARA’s social democratic legacy does not
continue to have an important impact on the ‘structure of feeling’ in which VARA
operates. But that impact is no longer object of extensive ideological debate within the
organization: rather, it is a matter of mentality, of attitude, of tradition, of inherited
institutional common sense. It manifests itself in the continuing adherence of most
VARA workers to accepted progressive humanist notions about politics and culture,
society and morality, concretized in the self-evident importance given to a list of social
issues such as justice, world peace, the problems of the Third World, the environment, or
social equality, which according to Van Dam (1987) are of particular interest to
progressive people; in caustic assertions as to why Hill Street Blues (‘critical approach of
police work’) would fit in VARA’s television schedule, and Miami Vice (‘unrealistic’)
would not (Van Dam, in Ang and Tee 1987); in the propensity to intersperse quiz shows,
comedy series and other popular entertainment programmes with items which give the
audience ‘something to learn’ (Ang 1988) and so on. Thus, contrary to the BBC, VARA
still does not consider it its role to provide an objective mirror of national life in its full
diversity; it still cherishes a partisan, progressive—or rather progressivist—‘message’
that it wants to get across.
But that ‘message’ is no longer translated into a clearcut missionary role of VARA
toward the audience: as Van Dam (1987:6) puts it, VARA should no longer seek to ‘tell
people what they should think, but that they should think’. It should no longer seek to
reform the audience according to some complete, preformulated ideology, but only offer
a series of ‘progressive’ views and opinions considered worthwhile to whom it may
concern. And so, what is left of the interventionist idea of ‘public service’ has dissolved
into a generalized, but detached, ‘journalistic attitude’ (ibid.), in the assumption that it is
more important to raise the right questions rather than imposing the right answers. If
VARA still wants to reform the audience, it is by arousing people’s curiosity, in the
conviction that, as Van Dam (ibid.) so nicely puts it, ‘an open mind is a joy forever’.
All in all, VARA’s history indicates, just as the BBC’s does, how the a priori
normative knowledge about the institution/audience relationship has gradually
disappeared from public service philosophy. That relationship has become much more
conditional, provisional, indefinite. As a result, as Burns (1977:143–4) has noted,
‘communication with audiences is reduced to the common Gestalt of a programme
“stream”…; public issues are translated into methods of programme construction, moral
problems into professional judgements’. For better or worse, in this pragmatic
atmosphere empirical information about the audience as provided by research forms
about the only connection with the audience that the institutions can officially rely on. In
this light, it is telling to cite the rhetorical deftness with which VARA management cast
the logic of gaining more information about the audience in the early 1980s:

Precisely because VARA, as broadcasting organization for the left
movement, has hefty pretensions and thus makes an appeal to its target