Page 162 - Living Room WarsDesprately Seeking the Audience Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Notes 150
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Netherlands: VARA and the loss of the natural audience
1 See, for more general studies of the Dutch system of pillarization, Lijphart (1968) and
Stuurman (1983).
2 Given the central tenets of liberalist ideology, with its strong valuation of individualism, it is
not surprising that the liberal pillar was the least rigidly organized of the four. The socialist
pillar was also less ‘total’ than the two religious pillars.
3 In terms of overt behaviour (e.g. membership of the organizations concerned), obedience was
certainly widespread. It is less sure, however, to what degree people were satisfied or agreed
with the official views of their leaders within the pillar. See Akkerman and Stuurman
(1985:16).
4 The pillarized broadcasting system, which became legalized in the Netherlands in 1930
recognized the legitimacy of five private broadcasting organizations, each assumed to be the
representatives of the various currents of thought prevailing within the nation. These
organizations were AVRO (General Radio Broadcasting Association), which called itself
national and neutral but which generally speaking recruited its members among those with a
liberal orientation (e.g. entrepreneurs); NCRV (Dutch Orthodox Protestant Broadcasting
Association), which represented the orthodox protestants; KRO (Catholic Broadcasting
Association), representing the catholics, the socialist VARA (Association of Workers’ Radio
Amateurs), and finally, the small VPRO (Liberal Protestant Broadcasting Association), for
the liberal protestants.
5 Thus, contrary to most other public broadcasting systems Dutch broadcasting organizations
are not charged with the obligation to be ‘neutral’ or ‘balanced’ in their provision of
information, education and entertainment. On the contrary, showing one’s colours serves as
the pre-eminent motto. See De Boer (1946) and Bardoel et al. (1975).
6 This democratic structure of the association of VARA still exists, and its collective rituals
(e.g. meetings to discuss VARA policy and the organization of spring and autumn festivities)
are still kept alive by an assorted, ever shrinking and ever ageing group of loyal members
(many of whom have been devoted social democrats since the interwar years). Within the
organization as a whole, the Association Council, consisting of delegates from the districts,
is officially the highest decision-making body. See Sluyser (1965) for a fond and moving
ethnographic description of the culture of VARA democracy in the 1930s, based upon his
own personal experiences and memories.
7 However, conversations with listeners who were around in the interwar years, carried out in
the early 1980s, revealed that they certainly did not only listen to the programmes of their
own pillar. See Manschot (1987).
8 Thus the first serious large-scale audience survey, Radio and Leisure in the Netherlands, was
commissioned by the Minister of Education, Art and Science in 1954.
9 Article 14c of the 1987 Dutch Media Act requires that a broadcasting organization ‘represent
in her programming a particular…social, cultural, religious or spiritual current and to direct
its programming to the satisfaction of social, cultural or religious or spiritual needs living
within the population’. This article still reflects the traditional ‘pillarized’ principle.
10 This is, of course, a rather limited and reformist notion of cultural emancipation, based upon
the assumption that the working class would gain by becoming equal to the more privileged
classes in society. Thus, other, more radical models of cultural politics—in the form of
autonomous cultural production, either along the nostalgic lines of the Arts and Craft
movement or according to the revolutionary ambitions of modernism, both of which were
influential within the Dutch social democratic movement between the two World Wars, were
never embraced within VARA. See Weijers (1988).
11 The British original—as well as the satire genre in general—was also very controversial. See
Briggs (1985:336–7). This suggests that the turmoil these programmes generated has