The Dutch Media Monopoly

The Dutch Media Monopoly VU University Press De Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam The Netherlands [email protected] www.vuuniversitypress.com © 2014 Tabe Bergman Design jacket: Haags Blauw (Bianca Wesseling) Type setting: JAPES, Amsterdam ISBN 978 90 8659 672 0 NUR 695 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

The Dutch Media Monopoly A Political-economic Analysis of the Crisis in Journalism in the Netherlands Tabe Bergman VU University Press

Contents

. Dutch Journalism in Crisis . Liberal or Radical? Rethinking Dutch Media History . The Forgotten Political Economists . A Dutch Propaganda Model . Following Washington’s Lead: The Press on Looming War in Iraq . Forget the Past: The Media on the US Withdrawal from Iraq . Euros over Citizens: The Press’s Narrow Definition of Democracy . Where to Take Dutch Journalism Author’s Note Bibliography

1. Dutch Journalism in Crisis Those of us who have kept up with the scholarship on the media in the United States will be aware that the strongly nefarious influence of commercialism on the quality of news has been accepted as fact by many scholars and is often regarded as a major contributor to the current crisis in journalism in that country (McChesney and Nichols 2010; McChesney and Pickard 2011). Books once deemed controversial, for instance Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988, 2002) and Ben Bagdikian’s editions of The Media Monopoly, have become part of the canon of American media scholars, although these books’ conclusions are by no means uncritically accepted by all (McChesney and Scott 2004). Most scholars of the coverage of foreign affairs agree with the basic points made by Herman and Chomsky, even if they rarely cite these infamous radicals (Herring and Robinson 2003). Robert McChesney and Ben Scott (2004) make plausible that the most common criticism of the American media was always that they are commercial and thus biased towards the interests of economic and political elites. Upton Sinclair already argued right after WWI in The Brass Check1 that their commercial underpinnings have given the American media a class bias. The American news media function as a vehicle of class propaganda. They often cover elite debates well. But if there is no debate, for instance because elites are united against the interests of the population, then the media are silent also and fail to fulfill their most important task: to serve democracy and the public good by acting as a check on corporate and state power. Lance Bennett’s indexing theory (1990) shows that news in the US generally reflects the debates among policymakers and not or only marginally the concerns and interests of the public. When elites regard an issue as unimportant, it will not become a hot news item. Perspectives that are not propagated by elites will remain marginal in the news coverage. In short, there exists a large and convincing body of scholarship documenting the nefarious influence of political but mainly economic interests on journalism in the US. This rich politicaleconomic tradition (McChesney 2007; Mosco 1996) can serve as an excellent starting point to examine other national media systems that are predominantly commercial in nature. Indeed, observers employing a political-economic perspective – those who explain media behavior and content primarily as a result of the power structures in which the media industry and journalists are embedded – have forcefully argued that British journalism too suffers from persistent elite biases, despite the prominence of the public broadcaster BBC (Davies 2009; Doherty 2005; Edwards and Cromwell 2006; Glasgow University Media Group 1977, 1980, 1982, 1985). From the English coast it is but a short trip to the Netherlands. This book addresses the question whether the persistent class bias identified in Anglo-American journalism also exists on the other side of the North Sea. Adopting a political-economic perspective, it seems likely on the face of it that journalism in the Netherlands exhibits the same serious flaw. For the Netherlands is a Western country with a pro-American outlook and possesses a privately-owned, advertising-dependent press that is hardly regulated and a predominantly commercial broadcasting system. The position that the Dutch media exhibit the same flaw in the reporting of especially foreign affairs and economic issues as their Anglo-American counterparts – and moreover to a comparable degree – is by no means generally accepted among Dutch scholars and other commentators. A

coherent political-economic perspective has long been absent from the scholarship (chapter 3). An inventory of the field of Dutch journalism studies concluded that hardly any research has been done on “economic developments [and] the influence of commercialism and the public relations industry on journalism.” Studies that map the changing constellations of media ownership are scant too. Some studies do mention “competition and commercialization as an independent variable to explain specific content,” but “the existence of market-driven journalism in the Netherlands remains… for the time being an assumption” (Brants and Vasterman 2010: 213). If indeed only an assumption, it is a very plausible one. At issue here is what constitutes proof of market-driven journalism. When economic hard times force the newspaper industry to lay off many journalists, as recently happened in the Netherlands, the common-sense assumption is that content will suffer as a result. This book aims to make the case that the market is the main driver of journalism in the Netherlands and that as a result the news is clearly biased in favor of elite interests. Dutch journalism does not act as an adequate check on corporate and state power and it does not promote citizen engagement in the public arena. In fact, it excludes the citizenry from that arena and upholds the hardly democratic status quo (chapter 7). Dutch journalism does the opposite of what it claims to be doing. It does the opposite of what it should do. This book provides fresh empirical evidence for the connection between the political economy of Dutch journalism and its content by showing that the pro-elite bias that one would expect as a result of private, concentrated ownership of advertising-dependent news media, can indeed be detected in the Dutch coverage of foreign affairs and the economy. This book argues that a politicaleconomic perspective is crucial for understanding the history of Dutch journalism and the crisis it is currently in and for finding a constructive way forward.

The crisis in Dutch journalism The contention that Dutch journalism is in crisis is not especially controversial. The Netherlands Association of Journalists (NVJ) already made this point in 2000 (Bardoel et al. 2002: 357). In 2009 two scholars argued that journalism had become an “endangered species.” Newspapers were in financial trouble and public broadcasting was facing severe budget cuts (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 316). Some commentators are blunt in their appraisal of contemporary Dutch journalism. It appears that journalism, which thought of itself as a “queen” is really a “maid” or perhaps even a “whore,” according to Bert Ummelen (2009: 2). Instructors at the journalism school in Tilburg and at Leiden University initiated a class in fact-checking because they suspected there to be “something fundamentally wrong with journalism” (Ummelen 2009: 2, 82; Silverman 2009). It is estimated that about a quarter of the jobs in the Dutch newspaper industry was cut between roughly 2005 and 2008 (Temporary Press Commission 2009: 31). Across all kinds of media organizations increased emphasis on the bottom line is visible (Rutten and Slot 2011: 38, 68-9). Investigative journalism in the Netherlands, such as it was, has withered away. The reasons for the very small number of investigative journalists are lack of money and broadcasting opportunities, according to journalist Anique Van den Bosch – not lack of interest (Feldmann 2010). Ad Van Liempt (2011) notes that newspapers and magazines too provide less and less space for investigative journalism. The much-vaunted public service broadcasting system is breaking down, argue Karen Donders and Tim Raats (2012: 167): It is fair to say that public service broadcasting in the Netherlands has been under severe pressure for the last decade, with criticism of both its pluralistic structure (and plans to merge several broadcasting organizations gaining ground) and the holistic nature of its remit. As a result of severe political and private sector criticism, there have been stringent budget cuts and demands to limit the public broadcasters’ internet and mobile activities are gaining ground.

Other lamentable developments also support the salience of a political-economic perspective and the assessment that Dutch journalism is in crisis. The newspaper industry is highly concentrated and churnalism, the speedy production of news without concern for quality, runs rampant in the regional press, to the detriment of citizens’ information needs (Hietbrink et al. 2010; Hijmans et al. 2009). A burgeoning pr-industry is overpowering journalism (Prenger et al. 2011). News agency ANP, arguably the most important information provider in the Netherlands, is privately owned and run for profit, as is its small competitor, Novum Nieuws. Social-scientific studies to a significant extent endorse the claim that Dutch news is biased in favor of the interests of political and economic elites. This is especially true of foreign affairs coverage (De Landtsheer et al. 2002; Rietman 1988; Vliegenthart and Schröder 2010; Walgrave and Verhulst 2005). The Dutch media do on occasion produce good journalism. Professionalism and objectivity, when interpreted constructively, can create pockets of resistance against the terror of the market place. The problem is that they are just that, mere pockets. Positive exceptions should blind no one to the fact that the commercial system forms a formidable barrier against the daily production of critical, independent journalism. Much of the quality journalism produced by the mainstream media comes about despite of the current system, not as a result of it.

Limits of a comparative perspective Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s seminal Comparing Media Systems (2004) spells out in great detail and with a lot of insight how media systems in Europe and North-America differ from each other. The authors regard the Netherlands as belonging to what they call the Democratic Corporatist Model, which they argue is characterized by traits that are often thought to be incompatible, namely a commercial media industry closely linked to politics; a journalism that is professional and objective and at the same time partisan; and a liberal tradition of press freedom that co-exists with relatively strong state intervention. In contrast, the Liberal Model, which one finds in the US and Britain, is characterized by a minimum of state intervention, especially in the US. Earlier than in the Democratic Corporatist countries and to a higher degree, journalism in the Liberal countries emancipated itself from politics through professionalization and became market-driven. Commentary is more prevalent in the Democratic Corporatist Model, whereas Liberal journalists focus on providing “information” (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 74-5). Hallin and Mancini’s typology raises the question to what extent differences between national media systems result in differences in the coverage of important political and economic issues. For instance, if not only the American but also the Dutch press covered the run-up to the war in Iraq uncritically, in effect serving the powerful proponents of war, then the differences between the media systems in the US and the Netherlands can be deemed less consequential than Hallin and Mancini appear to claim. The Netherlands is not the US. Because of differences between the two countries one cannot simply transpose conclusions regarding the American media to the Dutch context. Two differences appear especially relevant. For one, the spectrum of legitimate political opinion is broader in the Netherlands. ‘Objective’ journalists will consider the small left-wing political parties in the Netherlands to be legitimate sources, whereas the US lacks such a left side to its mainstream political spectrum. One would therefore expect the progressive perspective to be more clearly present in the Dutch news, also because Dutch society on the whole is probably more amenable to such a perspective than American society. Second, Dutch public broadcasting, which is mandated to produce news in the public interest, is much more prominent and better funded than PBS in the US (although not than the British BBC). For these and other reasons one would expect the Dutch media to adopt, for instance, a more skeptical attitude towards corporations than the American media. Quite regularly in Dutch scholarship and public debates the news media are compared to their British or American counterparts. The general tenor of these comparisons is that “it is not as bad in the Netherlands” as it is “over there.” This might be so. It is even plausible that this is the case, although such a broad assertion is rather difficult to prove empirically. The often overlooked point is that although a comparative perspective can be enlightening, it can also obscure certain aspects of reality. The assertion that “things are not as bad over here” often functions as a defense mechanism, which makes critical analysis of one’s own society seem less urgent. Assuming that the American, British and Dutch news systems are all severely flawed, would it matter much if one turned out to be a bit better than the other two? A comparative perspective can be dangerous in yet another way. Critics of commercial media systems like the American one tend to contrast these with media systems in Western-Europe and Scandinavia that include a strong public component. For instance, Radio Netherlands has been called

the “crown jewel of international public broadcasting” (McChesney and Nichols 2010: 110). There can be no question that in certain respects public broadcasting systems have served peoples better than commercial ones, for instance by paying less attention to celebrities (Curran 2011; Cushion 2012). The problems inherent in commercial media systems can be clarified by contrasting them to the more successful public systems. The danger is that such comparisons can (intentionally or not) convey the impression that the international crisis in journalism will be solved when all countries have installed public broadcasting systems similar to the Dutch system, while leaving intact the commercial environment they operate in. Although it is plausible that the news on the Dutch public channels is more informative than the news on commercial television in the US, the possibility should not be ignored that the political news on the Dutch public channels is often severely flawed, if only because of heavy dependence on news agencies like Reuters, Associated Press and their Dutch counterpart ANP. Astutely, Hallin and Mancini (2004: 83) observe a tendency for media critics in each system to believe that the grass is surely greener on the other side of the fence. Thus in the Liberal countries, media critics often look to the Democratic Corporatist system – particularly to Scandinavia, with its tradition of media tied to organized social groups – as a more democratic alternative to the commercial media that dominate their own system. But what British or Americans might see as a wonderful form of pluralism, the Scandinavian researchers will see more as a form of control of the media by the elites of established interests in society.

Before its budget got slashed from 44 million to 14 million euros a year (Van den Dool 2011), Radio Netherlands might have been, for what it is worth, the “crown jewel of international public broadcasting.” But content analyses might well show that its journalism too is often severely flawed. A media system that includes a strong public component is preferable to an overwhelmingly commercial system, but in the end the proof is in the pudding. That is to say, whether public broadcasting systems do indeed serve the public’s need for critical, independent coverage of powerful institutions can only be determined by content analyses. This book is not concerned with establishing whether Dutch journalism is better or worse than American or British journalism. It does not highlight the differences but the similarities between the Netherlands and the US and Britain. It is concerned with establishing that the same fundamental issue that plagues the latter countries, namely a pro-elite bias in the news as a result of journalism’s commercial underpinnings, can also be observed in the former.

Normative perspective This book measures the performance of the Dutch media not by a comparative yardstick but a normative one. McChesney and Nichols (2010: 163-4) have well summarized what journalism should do: 1. It must provide a rigorous account of people who are in power and people who wish to be in power, in the government, corporate and nonprofit sectors. 2. It must regard the information needs of all citizens as legitimate. 3. It must have a plausible method to separate truth from lies, or at least to prevent liars from being unaccountable and leading nations into catastrophes – particularly wars, economic crises and communal discord. 4. It must produce a wide range of informed opinions on the most important issues of our times – not only the transitory concerns of the moment, but also challenges that loom on the horizon. These issues cannot be determined primarily by what people in power are talking about. Journalism must provide the nation’s early warning system, so problems can be anticipated, studied, debated and addressed before they grow to crisis proportions.

McChesney and Nichols argue for activist news media that shed the restrictions of ‘objective’ journalism in favor of investigative reporting from a human rights perspective and concern about the public welfare and democracy. Some might object that journalism thus defined will contribute to cynicism about public life and even the rise of extremist political movements, for its emphasis is on exposing wrongdoings. Such journalism is primarily adversarial. One might counter by arguing that much more is gained than lost by defining journalism in that way. A journalism that does not continually address the dangers and abuses of concentrated power could well be much more dangerous to society than a journalism that holds back out of fear of fomenting disenchantment and radicalism. Indeed, it is the duty of journalism to speak out against the current political and economic systems in Western countries, as these are so patently and structurally unfair and undemocratic. The here adopted approach that compares the reality of the news industry and its content to an ideal (what journalism should do) is not without its dangers. For instance, there is no doubt that any media system thus evaluated will always fall short. Yet this realization should not result in a defeatist attitude. We need ideals. For we can only know where we are when we know where we should be (going). Journalism itself is unavoidably normative, as it is inextricably tied to the values of democracy. As James Carey (2000) wrote, “No journalism, no democracy; but, equally, no democracy, no journalism. Journalism and democracy are names for the same thing.”

Debates and scholarship on the Dutch media This book differs from almost all the existing scholarship and public debates on the Dutch media in that it adopts a political-economic approach underpinned by the values of radical democracy. This book assumes that the crisis in journalism can only truly be solved when Western societies complete a process of further democratization, including the democratization of the workplace. In contrast, the political orientation underlying the existing scholarship on the Dutch media is overwhelmingly socialdemocratic. This means, among other things, that the severely restricted, parliamentary form of democracy that now exists in the Netherlands, and which has been aptly characterized as “almost undemocratic” (De Rek 2012), is widely taken as the standard by which to judge the performance of the news media. As long as the media defend the current political system, they are deemed to perform their role as watchdog of democracy adequately. Yet when the media are judged by a more substantive definition of democracy, namely one that emphasizes the extent to which citizens have actual control over their own lives, the media’s performance appears in a much darker light (chapter 7). Dutch scholarship tends to focus on the dynamic between mainstream politician and mainstream journalist (e.g. Brants and Voltmer 2011). As a result it tends to underestimate the extent to which they are alike and buttress each other. Conversely, the strength of much work in the politicaleconomic tradition, especially as done by Herman and Chomsky, is that it constructs welldocumented versions of news events that differ from the versions propagated in mainstream politics and journalism, thereby showing the common errors of the politicians and journalists. Dutch scholarship fails to employ such a method and as a result often fails to recognize the extent to which frames put forward by politicians shape mainstream reporting and how far those frames are removed from reality. In Dutch scholarship and public debates the assumed depraved tastes of the public are not infrequently blamed for the low-quality news fare. Yet the partly true observation that the public often wants or at least endures worthless fare, while eschewing relevant political information, could well be the rational consequence of citizens realizing correctly that they have no influence over politics anyway. So why bother getting up to speed with what is going on? To journalists, what the public appears to want should be quite irrelevant. They are not supposed to give people what they want, they are supposed to provide the information that citizens need to understand how the world works. Only for journalists working in a commercial media system does it make sense to say that they are in the business of giving people what they want. Journalists who take this position accept that they primarily exist to produce as high a ratings or as many readers as possible – which is true, but not conducive to the production of high-quality journalism. Those who put the blame on the public for the abundance of trivial nonsense hyped by the media implicitly denounce journalism’s societal justification, although they often claim to uphold it. The position that journalists simply give the public what it wants ignores the crucial point that a steady supply of bad and irrelevant news does not just satisfy a demand that somehow spontaneously sprang up without the media’s complicity. In fact, media supply has been a prime factor in creating and stimulating the demand for and tolerance of low-quality, irrelevant content. Certainly children cannot be blamed for buying into the myths and hypes about celebrities and so on that the media present. From a young age, people unavoidably choose from the menu provided to them by the

mainstream media. They can be forgiven for not realizing that other food exists. The media are in no way solely responsible for the public’s tastes, but they are responsible for the unhealthy menu that they offer. Only after the media for at least a generation would have offered a mostly healthy menu, would they have a right to complain that people continue to refuse to eat their vegetables (Meehan 2005). Considerable awareness exists among the Dutch public that the media do not reflect or promote its interests but the interests of elites. But, of course, the public’s voice is marginal in public debates about the media (De Haan and Bardoel 2011). Proposed solutions to the crisis in journalism often do not go far enough or are based on a faulty analysis. Take the prominent journalist Jan Blokker. He is of the opinion that instead of speaking of a newspaper crisis we should speak of a “crisis of journalists” (Blokker 2010: 7). Blokker seems to believe that the crisis can be solved by journalists changing their behavior, without changing the structure they work in. If only they lose their timidity and become proud professionals, all will be well. Blokker (2010: 8) identifies a few moments in history at which Dutch journalists had the opportunity to “start their own, independent life” but failed to do so. He never quite explains why they have stubbornly refused, and continue to refuse, to do good journalism. For some reason Dutch journalists are naturally passive creatures and that’s just the way it is. His emphasis on the psyche of ‘the’ Dutch journalist blinds him to the structural restraints within which journalists work, although Blokker does give some credit to the view that emphasizes the detrimental effects of commercialism on journalism. Other observers who have proposed inadequate, non-structural solutions to end the crisis in journalism are the journalists Joris Luyendijk (2006), Folkert Jensma (Jensma and Laroes 2003) and Warna Oosterbaan and Hans Wansink (2008). Scholars’ solutions too often fall short. Mirjam Prenger et al. (2011: 114) proposed fifteen ways to make journalists less dependent on the prindustry. Only one of these concerned a structural matter: the authors argued for “limiting” the cutbacks on newsrooms. Yet they also asserted that journalists should not use a lack of resources as an excuse to neglect professional standards. Many of the proposed reforms amount to suggestions for better self-regulation among journalists and more transparency toward the public. Some observers (Brouwers 2013) call for some form of state subsidies to alleviate the crisis in journalism, but such proposals are widely seen as controversial.

Digital media’s impact on journalism After years of much optimism, in international scholarship the position appears to win ground that digital media have not and will not save journalism, let alone invigorate democracy (Bellamy Foster and McChesney 2011; Hindman 2009; McChesney 2013; Pedro 2011b). As James Curran (Fenton 2010: 25) sensibly argues, “While the internet is potentially a transforming technology, its impact is contingent on the wider societal context,” including the political economy. In order to realize the democratic potential of the internet, constructive policy measures will need to be implemented (Morozov 2011). How about the Netherlands? Until recently, the perspective of “digital utopianism” was dominant in the Dutch debates on the impact of digital media on journalism and democracy (Van Vree 2010: 220). Henk Blanken and Mark Deuze’s book PopUp provides a case in point. The authors (2007: 16) overestimate the positive influence of the internet, where “the costumer is truly king.” Although they give some due to commercialization as a detrimental factor, their proposed solutions demonstrate that they assign too little weight to the structural restraints that guide journalists’ behavior. The authors advise journalists to be more transparent, more flexible, to engage in more dialogue with the public and so on. Notably absent are solutions on the policy level. Indeed, the authors make it clear that they do not have much faith in the state. Ignoring the state fits into the authors’ view of the contemporary era as a “liquid modernity,” in which certainty does not exist and people do not collectively fight for their interests. The authors counsel journalists to simply accept that they might never again have a secure labor contract (Blanken and Deuze 2007: 232). The optimistic position that digital media will bring about a more vibrant journalism and invigorate democracy in the Netherlands does not compute on the basis of the available evidence. Chris Aalberts and Maurits Kreijveld (2011a and b) showed that social media have not fulfilled the potential that they according to many optimists have, namely to do away with the gap that separates politician from citizen. They concluded that those who use social media as a platform for civic discussions and activities typically were already politically engaged before. Tom Bakker and Chris Paterson (2011) found citizen and participatory journalism to hardly exist in the Netherlands. The traditional media outlets still dominate the news provision in the Netherlands (Schoenbach and De Waal 2011: 39-41). The daily public news show remains the most important news source for the Dutch, followed at a respectable distance by the daily news show of commercial broadcaster RTL4 (Schoenbach and De Waal 2011: 10). In the top ten of news sites, newspapers and the public broadcaster still set the tone (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 93). In other words, the migration of content to the internet has hardly stimulated more diversity of points of view. Yael De Haan’s conclusion (2011: 209) therefore appears valid: “Even though new technologies have provided possibilities for relating and interacting with the public, at this point the public predominantly continues to assume the role of receiver.” The crisis in Dutch journalism will not be solved by the mere presence of the internet. Farreaching measures are necessary.

Book’s aim and structure A scholarly justification for emphasizing the class bias in reporting and commentary that results from the commercial underpinnings of the Dutch media is that Dutch journalism studies has only to a limited extent acknowledged the nefarious influence of commercialism and has hardly been concerned with proving this point on the content level (Brants and Vasterman 2010). This book takes the conclusions drawn by American and British scholars regarding the strongly nefarious influence of industry concentration and dependence on advertisers on the quality of journalism as a starting point and aims to show that these conclusions can also be drawn for Dutch journalism, despite the probably somewhat benign influence of public broadcasting and despite other (e.g. political) differences between Britain and the US on the one hand and the Netherlands on the other. In short, this book makes the case that there exists a Dutch Media Monopoly that is hurting journalism and democracy. This book aims to resuscitate the political-economic perspective on the Dutch media as voiced by a small band of scholars and other observers in the 1970s. It does so by presenting evidence that the Dutch media in the twentieth century have not primarily served the public interest but rather the interests of their financiers: the advertisers and owners. This book can be called radical because it explains media behavior and content by pointing to the structural features of the media system. It is also radical in its suggestion that only structural changes can lead to better journalism (McChesney and Scott 2004). The primary feature of the Dutch media is that they are thoroughly commercial. It might therefore be expected on the basis of one successful political-economic theory of the media, namely the propaganda model (chapter 4), that their content is structurally biased in favor of the interests of the economic and political elites that own the media and as sources dominate news content. The most important reason for writing this book is the crisis in which Dutch journalism and democracy find themselves today. The first step towards recovery, as they say, is recognizing that you have a serious problem. The position that one cannot expect consistently good journalism from a commercial media system is underappreciated in the scholarly, political and public debates in the Netherlands. Well-intentioned efforts to significantly improve the quality of Dutch journalism can only fail unless it is clearly understood that as long as the media remain overwhelmingly commercial they will not do what they are supposed to, but will continue to promote the hardly democratic status quo by providing information that is biased towards elite interests. Chapter 2 argues for an interpretation of Dutch media history which suggests that journalism in the twentieth century has not served the public interest but elite interests instead. Chapter 3 recaptures political-economic critiques of the Dutch media in the 1970s and argues that they are much more salient today, because of the increased commercialization of the media system. By providing a snapshot of the current Dutch media landscape, chapter 4 argues that the propaganda model applies to the Netherlands, although not with the same force as to the US. The subsequent empirical analyses (chapters 5, 6 and 7) provide fresh evidence for a class bias in news content. Chapter 5 discusses the press coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003. Chapter 6 evaluates the commentary on the US troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. Chapter 7 provides data indicating the lack of respect for substantive democracy among Dutch journalists by examining the press reactions to the Greek prime-minister’s proposal in 2011 for a referendum on the euro crisis. Chapter 7 also highlights the crisis in Dutch democracy, which is closely tied to the crisis

in journalism. Chapter 8 broadly points to viable avenues for resolving those two kindred crises.

2. Liberal or Radical? Rethinking Dutch Media History This chapter makes the case that the existing scholarship contains the essential ingredients for a “radical” reading of Dutch media history in James Curran’s typology (2002, 2009). Although scholars typically do not endorse such a reading but rather a “liberal” one, they have themselves presented compelling evidence to support the position that the Dutch media were submissive first to politics and subsequently to economic forces; that they often served elite interests and not the interests of the population; and that they structurally marginalized voices outside the political mainstream, especially on the left. In other words, although an explicitly radical perspective on Dutch media history is (virtually) non-existent in the scholarship, quite a lot of evidence supports it. This chapter is structured in the following way. A brief explication of Curran’s “metanarratives” of media history is followed by a review of historiographical developments in the study of the Dutch media. Then a version of Dutch media history from the 1930s onwards is presented that highlights events, developments and research that point to the viability of a radical reading. The main focus is on the 1960s and beyond because the liberal reading’s primary weakness concerns too positive an evaluation of the performance of the news media in that period. The last section before the conclusion summarizes research that indicates the pervasiveness of market considerations and institutional reporting in the 1990s and at the start of the new millennium.

The historiography of the Dutch media James Curran (2002, 2009) identifies seven strands of media history writing. These meta-narratives are the liberal, feminist, populist, libertarian, anthropological, technological-determinist and radical perspectives. This chapter is limited to examining the relative value of the liberal and radical metanarratives for understanding Dutch media history and therefore does not address the other five. The liberal version tells an optimistic story of progress facilitated by the media, a story of the news media’s development from partisanship to professionalism and emancipation from politics. Journalism is seen to have empowered the people and to have acted as an efficacious check on government. In stark contrast, the radical perspective claims that the media have taken power away from the population and are submissive to both the state and corporations. The media function as a tool of elite interests by highlighting the views and doings of the established political parties and marginalizing perspectives outside of that rather narrow ideological spectrum, especially left-wing perspectives. In the radical reading the market serves “not as an engine of freedom, as in the liberal narrative” but as “a system of control” (Curran 2009: 10). In his review of the historiography of Dutch journalism, Marcel Broersma (2011: 17) describes the liberal meta-narrative as “a story of continuous progress in which the development of journalism is interpreted as a long road from a partisan press to press freedom, including the establishment of an autonomous profession independent of political and economic powers that obeys more or less the objectivity regime and the practices and formal conventions resulting from it.” That teleological tale is not just the prevailing framework in Britain (Curran 2009) and the US (Carey 2011) but also in the Netherlands (Broersma 2011: 24). It emerged in the 1970s, when journalists and others began to critically evaluate the partisan journalism of the era of pillarization, which was then coming to an end. Pillarization, a strong form of segmented pluralism, arose in the late nineteenth century. The four major political and cultural groups in Dutch society (the Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and freemarket Liberals) each set up their own ‘pillar.’ That is to say, they established their own social organizations like sports clubs and schools. Together, so the theory went, the four pillars upheld the ‘roof’ of the Dutch nation state. Media outlets were an integral part of pillarization. The objective of a pillarized media outlet was to promote its pillar’s worldview and thereby maintain group cohesion. Journalism was partisan and focused on providing commentary and context; on explaining how the day’s events fitted in and justified a pillar’s worldview. Journalists were submissive to their pillar’s political elite, not just because of exerted pressure but because they held the same beliefs. Frequently the same people that ran a political party also directed the media outlets. The broadcasting system was run by private organizations that had been set up by the four main groups in society. There was a Socialist, a Liberal, a Catholic and a Protestant broadcaster. Each pillar’s elite employed the media to maintain the support of – and authority over – the pillar’s base. The elites communicated among themselves in the process of policy formation but there was much less interaction between the ordinary members of the different pillars. Such interaction was in fact discouraged. It is tempting, and to some degree justified, to view Dutch pillarized broadcasting as an admirable, inclusionary system that guaranteed a platform to the leading social groups. The broadcasting system was unique in that it was directed neither by the state nor the market. Nonetheless, Dutch media and politics were authoritarian and top-down.

According to Broersma the historiography of Dutch journalism went through three stages. The first stage lasted until the 1980s and comprised isolated scholars (often former journalists) who wrote nationally-oriented, institutional histories of media organizations. They focused on presenting facts. Analysis and providing an explanatory narrative took a backseat to unearthing sources and quoting at length. Broersma does not mention it, but already in the 1970s a small number of critical observers endorsed a radical interpretation of Dutch media history. They were dismissive not just of pillarized journalism but also of the emerging professional, market-driven journalism (e.g. Brants 1974; Bardoel et al. 1975). A chapter in the critical book Perskoncentratie, entitled “Development to a monopoly press,” remains one of the few, if not the only, sustained discussions of the history of the Dutch press that (avant la lettre) rejects the liberal framework (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972). The critical perspective on the Dutch media petered out in the 1980s and was forgotten (chapter 3). In Broersma’s account, the 1990s saw the rise of the second generation of scholars. They were interested in “theoretical debates, paradigms and approaches” and research from abroad, especially Britain and the US (e.g. James Carey and Michael Schudson). In contrast to the first generation they often worked at universities (Broersma 2011: 20). The field’s focus shifted from institutional histories to the examination of journalistic routines, professionalism and the newsroom (Broersma 2011: 23). The second generation of scholars disdained pillarized journalism. Since the 1980s the liberal frame of media history prevails (Broersma 2011: 18). Canonical studies like Frank Van Vree’s history of newspaper de Volkskrant (1996) and Huub Wijfjes’s history of journalism (2004) adopted a liberal framework. Journalism was described as having liberated itself from the all too obvious political constraints of pillarization, becoming professional and autonomous, and thus finally capable of performing its assigned role in a modern society, namely that of the guardian of democracy. The third generation of scholars emerged in the new millennium and aims to write “a more integrated form of history by systematically analyzing the content of news and integrating it in the institutional and journalistic production context.” These scholars examine “form and style conventions that allude to journalistic norms and broader cultural discourses and determine how news is structured and how social reality is organized” (Broersma 2011: 21-2). The liberal version of media history has much going for it. There can be no doubt for instance that pillarized journalism fell far short of liberal (and radical) notions of journalism’s role in a democracy (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2007; Christians et al. 2009). As many scholars have documented, Dutch journalism until the 1960s was not critically reporting on those in power (Bardoel et al. 2002: 16). The political parties set the news agenda. A mentality of secrecy among elites was part and parcel of what is commonly referred to as pacification politics. Elites withheld information from their constituencies in a “conscious” effort to keep them “quiet and internally divided.” The politicians of the different pillars worked together to hammer out compromises which were sold to the public (or better: publics) with the crucial assistance of the pillarized media. Journalism during pillarization has been aptly characterized as a “lapdog” (Bardoel et al. 2002: 89-90). Broersma criticizes the liberal version of media history. He argues that it caricatures pillarized journalism by exaggerating journalists’ obedience to politics. According to him, the presentist and normative nature of the denouncements of pillarized journalism has impeded a thorough understanding of its style and historical context. Therefore he pleads (2011: 18) “for a more nuanced history of journalism that takes reflective styles of journalism seriously.” Broersma’s criticism of the liberal

perspective has merit but is incomplete. He neglects to address the possibility that its proponents are wrong not just in their perhaps overly vehement denunciations of pillarized journalism, but also in their assumption that its successor, professional journalism, has adequately performed its task of watchdog of democracy. Additionally, it is not inevitable that noting the flaws of pillarized journalism by liberal (or radical) standards leads to a myopic view that only sees the negatives of that form of journalism, although strong proponents of professionalism and objectivity will be particularly susceptible to succumbing to such blanket denunciations. The prevailing position among scholars (not to mention journalists, e.g. Oosterbaan and Wansink 2008) is that since the crumbling of the pillars, and at least until quite recently, journalists have reported independently and objectively on the elites to which they are no longer beholden. Wijfjes (2004) for instance characterizes journalism after depillarization as “autonomous-critical.” According to Kees Brants, politics still set the agenda during election campaigns but journalism “emancipated” itself. It started to follow politics “critically,” out of concern for democracy (Bardoel et al. 2002: 90). Indeed, depillarization changed journalism for the better – but only in some respects and to a limited extent. Professionalism and objectivity became paramount. For all their drawbacks (Luyendijk 2006; Mindich 1998) they assisted journalists in emancipating themselves from overt political constraints. The liberal notion is so seductive then because it contains more than a grain of truth. At the same time it is problematic because it rests on the mistaken assumption that journalism grounded in professionalism and objectivity and institutionalized in an oligopolistic media industry provides a viable basis for independent journalism. Much scholarship has been devoted to debunk this notion (Bagdikian 2004; Herman and Chomsky 1988, 2002; McChesney 1999, 2004). Moreover, the position that journalism since depillarization has been autonomous and critical has little evidence to support it. Content analyses generally show the opposite, namely an institutionally-oriented journalism that primarily serves the interests of political and economic elites (chapter 4). Probably in part because of their emphasis on the problematic aspects of journalism during pillarization, the proponents of the liberal version of media history underestimate the negatives of the market-driven, professional journalism that replaced it. The following section discusses Dutch media history from the 1930s onwards with the aim of demonstrating the viability of a radical reading. The focus is on the period after pillarization, because the liberal narrative’s main weakness is its contention that journalism since then has adequately performed its role. An important reason for nonetheless discussing the media during pillarization is the insight this provides in the systematic policies of marginalization of left-wing voices. Such marginalization constitutes a central component of a radical reading and has arguably exerted a lasting impact on the Dutch media landscape. An additional reason for discussing the preprofessional era is to demonstrate the considerable extent to which the pillarized media were already subject to market forces.

Dutch media history: A critical look The press and the ANP before WWII The history of the national news agency (ANP) supports the assertion that Dutch journalism has primarily catered to the powers that be. In 1934 newspaper publishers established the ANP in order to terminate the influence of the existing commercial news agencies. Another reason for setting up the ANP was the sentiment that the Netherlands, like so many other countries, ought to boast its own national news agency. Such an agency was considered to be in the national interest, although the ANP was to be independent of the state (Baggerman and Hemels 1985: 76). The ANP’s position in the media landscape was precarious. The pillarized media lived in continual fear that the ANP-news would be ‘biased.’ They therefore put much pressure on the agency to remain ‘objective,’ for instance by dedicating roughly equal time to news about each of the pillars. The result was that the ANP-news overwhelmingly came from official sources and exhibited a conservative bias. Its tone was as depoliticized and neutral as possible. The ties between the ANP and the government were “very close.” The ANP gladly functioned as the preferred messenger boy of the government and willingly submitted to censorship (Koedijk 1996: 32). During WWII the ANP collaborated so thoroughly with the German occupiers that it earned the widely-used nickname Adolf’s New Parrot. In the decades following WWII the ANP still openly prided itself on its “exquisite” relationships with the royal family, the diplomatic community and the government and other large organizations (Koedijk 1996: 32-3). Pillarization notwithstanding, the newspapers were a “commercial product” (Bardoel et al. 2002: 363). The diverging commercial interests of the Catholic newspapers, for instance, overrode their religious affinity (Broersma 2000: 563-5). Moreover, much of the press never aligned with a pillar. Between the world wars the so-called neutral or commercial press controlled about half of the total circulation (Wijfjes 2004). The neutral press’s “undertone” was “rather conservative,” presumably a reflection of its commercial character and owners’ interests (Kelly et al. 2004: 145). The authorities did not have much to fear from the press, “at the most a little,” for among the press corps “there existed in general… a great respect for the [justice] authorities.” Attempts to expose wrongs in politics and the court system were the “exception” (Wijfjes 2004: 173-5).

The press and the ANP since the 1970s Still in 1970 the ANP strongly identified with the interests of the Dutch state. Press releases by the government’s pr-department were by definition worthy of an article. In an interview editor-in-chief Joop Baggerman denied that the agency was subservient to the government. But in the same breath he affirmed the ANP’s credulous attitude towards the state by adding that governmental spokespersons “of course” would not lie to him. He revealed that they would sometimes inform him that they could not answer a certain question. Their explanation as to why would, again “of course,” be off the record. It was ANP-policy to never publish articles based on sources that wished to remain anonymous, with one exception: when the source in question was governmental (Van Westerloo 1970). ANP’s coverage tended to focus on events that affirmed nationalist values, like a trip abroad by

the queen. The coverage ignored the activities of social movements and other progressive organizations, even mildly reformist ones. Activists often complained about this neglect, referring to the ANP as the “press agency of the status quo.” Baggerman admitted that his agency was “rather conservative,” adding that investigative journalism was just not something that the ANP did (Van Westerloo 1970). Research on the ANP is scant, but it is clear that since the 1970s the agency has more and more abided by the commercial logic. In the late 1990s its owners, the newspapers, were “acting increasingly like shareholders,” treating the ANP as a business like any other. In response the ANP adopted a “profit center mentality” (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen 2000: 91). At the start of the twenty-first century, the private equity firms NPM Capital and Gimv acquired a majority stake in the news agency. Investigative journalism spiked in the 1970s, which was also arguably the most progressive period in Dutch politics. Depillarization was well underway and full-fledged market-driven journalism had yet to emerge. In this transitional period journalists produced “a large number of articles and programs on corruption, fraud, abuses and other socially unacceptable behavior by businessmen [and] politicians” (RMO 2003: 84). They reported from the perspective of the citizen, with the explicit aim of contributing to the emancipation of the disadvantaged (Kooyman 1977). Yet in the 1980s this citizen perspective degenerated in a trope aimed at personalizing the news in order to bind readers to the paper. The 1970s also witnessed the rise of celebrity and gossip journalism. As a result of the increasingly commercial nature of the media, fluff became more prevalent (RMO 2003: 84-5). Even the quality media started to feature ‘news’ about the private affairs of public figures on their pages and in their programs. Throughout the twentieth century market imperatives contributed to the dismantling of many leftwing publications, like the social-democratic newspaper Het Vrije Volk in the early 1970s (Hamelink 1978: 25; Rogier et al. 1985). Cees Hamelink (1978: 107-8) concluded that in the mid1970s information provision was first and foremost a commercial undertaking. Fulfilling the information needs and rights of the citizen was not the primary aim of the media industry, which constituted a significant part of the economy. In other words, the Dutch Media Monopoly emerged; it endures until the present day (Dutch Media Authority 2013; chapter 4). In 1975 three companies controlled 97 percent of the national newspaper market (Hamelink 1979: 293). Hamelink (1979: 296) estimated that “over 50% of the total production and distribution of communications goods and services is controlled by some 30 corporations. These corporations have a number of interrelationships with each other and with other large industrial and financial firms, by way of investments, interlocking directorates or joint-ventures.” Hamelink (1978: 127) characterized the picture of the world that arose from the news as follows: Important are… only the countries of the North-Atlantic Treaty. The official spokespersons of those countries describe what is happening in the world. Important events are mostly those which concern politicians, soldiers, and criminals. The world revolves around (white) men. Women are housewives. Colored people are problems. The world is a kaleidoscope of mostly negative incidents that are all completely unrelated to each other.

Hamelink’s description fits with a political-economic diagnosis of what is typically wrong with the content provided by professional journalists in a commercial news system: an overreliance on official sources, a lack of historical and sociological context, and marginalization of the needs and views of the underprivileged and minorities. Indeed, Teun Van Dijk (1983) concluded that the Dutch news was rife with racism.

Content analyses confirm that in the 1970s the capitalist nature of the media and the professionalization of journalism resulted in persistent biases. Harry Van den Berg and Kees Van der Veer found that the press framed a strike in 1972 at a plant owned by Akzo-Nobel in the same way as the corporation. The press too regarded the loss of jobs as “inevitable.” The researchers (1986: 503) blamed the institutional orientation of the reporting on the requirements of “objectivity, impartiality and balance.” The reporting affirmed the authority of union leaders, corporation spokespeople and government sources and marginalized voices from the union base. The ideological spectrum of the reporting was limited on the one end by a frame which legitimized Akzo-Nobel’s policy and on the other by a more progressive frame, which emphasized that the laid-off workers should be compensated. An additional common frame was that of consensus: a plea to corporation and unions to work out a compromise (Van den Berg and Van der Veer 1986: 504-5). Only two newspapers deviated from these frames. The widely-read, populist-conservative De Telegraaf unequivocally took the side of Akzo-Nobel and the marginal, communist De Waarheid reported overtly from the perspective of the union base. The latter paper was alone in questioning the necessity of the layoffs, framing the story as a consequence of the need for Akzo-Nobel to maximize profits (Van den Berg and Van der Veer 1986: 506). Preliminary research into the reporting on union actions in 1980 confirmed the researchers’ expectation that the press treatment of strikes was becoming (even) less sympathetic, a consequence of the political climate’s shift towards neoliberal notions of free markets and privatization, and the concomitant decline of unionism (Van den Berg and Van der Veer 1986: 509-10). The coverage of the Akzo-Nobel strike on the daily public news show was “characterized by the fact that official informants of respectable bodies are allowed to speak their mind” and put “a relatively strong emphasis… upon views of the affair favorable towards employers.” The current affairs shows of the pillarized broadcasting organizations presented a view of the strike that could be characterized as “ambiguously favorable towards employees, with their desperate complaints, emotional accounts, etc.” (Van den Berg et al. 1984: 45). Van den Berg and Van der Veer (1986: 502) speculated that labor reporting in the Dutch media frequently employed a frame that regarded the economic system as beyond discussion. The media’s favorable attitude towards the interests of capital also shone through in the negative reporting on Salvador Allende’s reforms in Chile (Hamelink 1978: 123). Extensive research is lacking, but there can hardly be any doubt that throughout the Cold War the Dutch news exhibited a distinct bias in favor of Washington. The press, “imprisoned” as it was “in a strongly pro-American and anti-Russian frame of reference,” reported uncritically on racism in the US. Apart from the communist newspaper the press mostly ignored the issue, whereas polls showed that the Dutch population was highly critical of racism. After the seminal court case Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 the press paid a bit more attention to racism in the US but still downplayed it, for instance by framing it as a southern instead of an American issue. The events in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, where federal troops enforced the desegregation of education, augured in a more critical stance, but the US retained its privileged status in the Dutch press as “friend and ally” (Roholl 2008). The reporting on the war in Vietnam, which was supported by the Dutch government, was likely also biased towards the official position of the US, especially during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 156). Much of the criticism of the war that was present in the media might well have been procedural: focused on tactics as opposed to aims (Van Benthem

van den Berg 1967: 18-20; Van der Maar 2007: 79-81). The Western-European press, including three Dutch papers, by and large adopted Washington’s stance towards elections in Central-America in the 1980s, despite the abundance of credible, alternative assessments provided by independent election observers and others (Rietman 1988).

The decline of public service broadcasting The pillarized broadcasting system, consisting of private organizations without monetary aims that represented the main groups in society, was a unique creation. For those unwilling to leave broadcasting to the state or the market, the Dutch model showed that an alternative existed. Until 1940, the public broadcasting organizations were exclusively funded with voluntary contributions from individual citizens (Nieuwenhuis 1992: 205). According to Jo Bardoel (2003b: 93), the “direct access of social movements to radio and television and a public broadcasting system based on separate associations with ideologically or religiously organized members” resulted in “a diversity of content and an involvement of citizens hardly known anywhere else in the world.” Nonetheless, it should be remembered that the broadcasting system also excluded groups, especially on the left. Through strong “political-authoritarian repression… exercised by the confessional political elite” in the interwar period, the “revolutionary socialists” were prevented from airing radio programs, although they “scrupulously adhered to the formal requirements for getting a broadcast license.” Not just the revolutionary socialists were thwarted. The government succeeded in excluding “all extremist” voices from the airwaves (De Winter 2004: 73). In 1930 the government instituted radio censorship because the VARA, the broadcaster connected to the social-democratic political party SDAP, was seen as dangerous. Censorship was made stricter in 1933; polarizing items on politics were prohibited. Prime-minister Hendrik Colijn threatened the VARA with taking away its airtime altogether. Socialist hymns were prohibited and the broadcaster was taken off the air for one day. The result was that the VARA lost its radicalism and became more “pragmatic.” The other broadcasters too became more careful. Political journalism on the radio, which was scant, anyway, lost “all sharp edges and all spontaneity” (Wijfjes 2004: 157). In 1934 the laws that prohibited insulting authorities, population groups, God, the royal family or friendly heads of state were again strengthened. This led to many minor convictions and to multiple confiscations of presses on which communist or national-socialist papers were printed (Wijfjes 2004: 208). The censorship commission, which remained in place until WWII, prohibited more than a thousand programs completely or partially. The VARA was by far the most common victim: almost seven hundred times (Bardoel et al. 1975: 25). The leading commercial newsreel producer featured the SDAP only in exchange for the purchase of one of its films (Hogenkamp 1984). Commercial news reels avoided party politics, foreign events, controversial issues and riots. Much of the content concerned “national” and “neutral” topics that “were of interest to everyone”: the royal family, human interest stories and celebrities (Wijfjes 2004: 153). Frustrated by the depiction of workers in the commercial newsreels, the labor movement attempted to produce its own newsreels (Hogenkamp 1984). Policies geared towards excluding voices from the left remained in place after WWII. Until 1965, the government denied the communists the opportunity to address voters about upcoming elections on radio and television, although they held seats in parliament. Remarkably, in the mid-

1950s it was decided that the extreme-right NOU-party would be allowed to propagandize on radio and television. Protests against the double standard put the government in a bind. Fortunately it turned out that one of the NOU-candidates for a seat in parliament was a collaborator during the war and as a punishment had been stripped of his right to run for public office. The government now had a ‘legitimate’ reason to keep the party off the airwaves (Jos Van Dijk 2004: 77-8). Pressures exerted by the business community for the establishment of commercial broadcasting led to a political controversy in the Netherlands, which in turn resulted in the parliamentary coalition breaking up in 1965. Legislation adopted in 1967 continued to outlaw commercial broadcasting, but a limited amount of commercials was now permitted on public television. Some evidence suggests that the introduction of commercials went against the public’s wishes. In 1962 a prospective commercial broadcaster, OTEM, commissioned a study on people’s attitudes towards commercial broadcasting. From OTEM’s perspective the results were disappointing. The public preferred the existing situation to commercial exploitation of the airwaves and held the opinion that if commercials were introduced, the revenues should be used to cover the cost of the production of programs, not to make a profit (Bardoel et al. 1975: 37-8). The 1967 legislation opened up the broadcasting system to new organizations. This change proved especially beneficial to politically neutral broadcasters that focused on providing entertainment. Successful new broadcasters the TROS and Veronica openly courted large audiences. They were “associations that unequivocally set out to offer what the public was thought to want – more entertainment, music, lively and neutral information, and the like” (McQuail 1993: 82). The legislative changes resulted in a “concealed form of commercialization” of the broadcasting system (Kelly et al. 2004: 148). The enforced competition between the broadcasting organizations for paying members (the more members, the more airtime) negatively affected serious current affairs broadcasting. The progressive role that television journalists had played in the process of depillarization faded out in the 1970s. Television lost its watchdog function. In the words of journalist Herman Wigbold: “There was a growing affinity between the new power elite – more open, more democratic, more tolerant than the old power elite but still an elite – and the television journalists” (Smith 1979: 227-8). Citizen participation in the broadcasting organizations disappeared (Bardoel 2003b: 83). Hamelink (1979: 296) concluded that Dutch public media generally show more similarity than differentiation… For almost half of their information flow they relay messages that were manufactured and packaged according to the tastes of the average USA supermarket consumer. What they produce nationally – with important though marginal exceptions – tends to have the same orientation: mainly guided by the expected exchange-value of the informational commodity. The implication is that even in the Netherlands with traditionally strongly divisive political and religious identifications – on which a (theoretically) pluralist media system was built – public communications is characterized by its devotion to the politics of the ‘global shopping center.’

The media law of 1988 still banned commercial broadcasting but the writing was already on the wall. Again the business community piled on the pressure, pointing to European Union guidelines that urged the liberalization of markets. The first commercial television station aimed at the Dutch market started broadcasting from Luxemburg in 1989 and thereby, through a legislative loophole, broke open the market (RMO 2003: 80). Commercial radio gained access to the cable in the late 1980s. In 1992, the ether too was opened to commercial exploitation (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 112-3). Since, serious journalism on the commercial channels has been conspicuous only by its absence, with the exception of one daily news show on RTL4.

With the advent of commercial broadcasting the pressure on public broadcasting to pay even more attention to ratings increased. The public broadcasting organizations undoubtedly were much more concerned about ratings than fulfilling the “Enlightenment-inspired cultural-pedagogic mission” that constitutes their societal justification (Kelly et al. 2004: 152). It would be better if ratings played a “much less dominant role” in determining the behavior of the public broadcasting organizations, an authoritative report argued. For public broadcasting should not just be independent of the government but also of commercial interests (RMO 2003: 45, 48).

The Dutch media in the 1990s This section summarizes scholarship and research that demonstrate that in the 1990s commercial imperatives were the dominant driver of the Dutch media and that news content was frequently biased in favor of political and economic elites. Peter Vasterman and Onno Aerden (1995: 127) noted that much research shows that “the news is dominated by professional, institutional sources.” They (1995: 64, 70) argued that commercial imperatives, although often indirectly, exert a significant influence on journalistic practices, for instance by mandating that publications clearly define their target audience. Media companies were navigating the thin line between safeguarding their independence and making sure they received enough revenue, for advertisers prefer publications that are not too critical of the consumer society. Vasterman and Aerden (1995: 77) documented capital’s direct interference with journalistic content. For instance, when the cinema chain Cannon threatened Het Parool with withdrawing its advertising, the Amsterdam newspaper gave in to the company’s demand, namely that columnist Theo Van Gogh be let go. The controversial filmmaker had written something that displeased the company. Former publisher and journalist Jan Greven (2004: 43) admitted that “in some newspaper companies… economic considerations… directly influence… the journalistic process.” Vasterman (2004) argued that commercialization and competition were important causes of a spike in media hypes. The media seemed more terrified than ever to miss ‘the’ news and therefore often moved as a pack. Because of developments like the speeding up of the news cycle, journalists had less and less time to check their facts. The rise to prominence of infotainment programs put pressure on the serious media to also cover the latest break-up of the newest starlet (Bergman 2004). Mirjam Prenger and Frank Van Vree (2003) showed that at the dawn of the twenty-first century the commercial logic held editors-in-chief of newspapers in a tight grip. Management had made them responsible for circulation, profits and other issues which traditionally were the prerogative of the business side. Prenger and Van Vree also found that in the Netherlands pr-practitioners outnumbered journalists. Mark Deuze (2002) concluded that the typical Dutch journalist at the start of the twenty-first century was a white male, about forty years old, with a university or professional degree. Politically he considered himself left-wing. He valued a skeptical attitude towards big business and the government. He also valued speedy reporting and providing analysis and context. He regarded himself as operating “free of commercial pressures” but his “main goal” was “to reach and maintain as many subscribers as possible.” His contact with ethnic minorities was “negligible” and he hardly if at all communicated with the public. He was “definitely an ambitious (or even: pretentious) professional” (Deuze 2002: 92-4).

In 2000, scholars at the University of Nijmegen concluded that the media had become part of the establishment and that ethnic minorities felt that they were routinely represented in a negative way; in other words, that Dutch journalism was “white” (Evers 2008: 36, 39). Jo Bardoel and Leen D’Haenens (2004: 190) argued that “journalism is evidently more successful in explaining the policies of the ‘elite’ to the citizen, but is clearly less successful when it comes to explaining the needs and requirements of the citizens to the political elite. In this sense, the media professionals – who themselves come primarily from the social-economic middle class – have obvious shortcomings.” Media reporting was deemed to impede rather than foster citizenship (RMO 2003: 97). The daily public news show exhibited an institutional bias, according to Philip Van Praag Jr. During election campaigns the agenda-setting program focused almost exclusively on the political parties that were likely to take part in the future governing coalition. Van Praag found that “Small parties and big oppositional parties which probably will not be part of the next cabinet are hardly deemed interesting… The editors apparently do not regard it as their task to inform the voters as best as possible about the possible choices” (Bardoel et al. 2002: 315). The reporting on foreign affairs continued to display a systematic pro-Western bias. A quality newspaper’s coverage of the first and second Intifadas, the Palestinian uprisings against the illegal Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, exhibited a bias in favor of the Israeli version of events (Deprez et al. 2011). Current affairs and news programs on the public and commercial broadcasters were also found to be biased in favor of Israel (Hamelink 2004: 45-6). The press reported on the war in Kosovo in 1999 in a way which “marginalized” public opinion and opponents of the war (De Landtsheer et al. 2002: 428). The coverage had a distinct pro-NATO flavor. The press, including quality dailies de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad, depicted the war “in a very one-sided, polarizing way,” with all the blame being assigned to the Serbs. In contrast to the British and Italian press, which provided some room for oppositional perspectives, the Dutch press shut out counter-voices to the pro-NATO narrative (De Landtsheer et al. 2002: 426). The reporting on the Kosovo-war on public channels was also clearly biased in favor of the Kosovo Albanians, the party in the conflict favored by NATO. The media accepted as fact NATO’s public justifications for interfering in the conflict, despite their lack of plausibility (Hamelink 2004: 47; Chomsky 1999). Another study criticized the reporting on the civil wars in former-Yugoslavia, particularly the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, which was preceded by the withdrawal of a Dutch contingent of UNsoldiers (Wieten 2002). A study by de Volkskrant concerning its own reporting on the Srebrenicamassacre found that opinions and preconceived notions had overshadowed fact-finding. The newspaper had depended too much on official, governmental sources in The Hague, the seat of government (Hamelink 2004: 47-51). After the murder in 2002 of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, whose rise to prominence threatened the established political parties, Volkskrant-journalists concluded that they had not done enough fact-finding and that their reporting had lacked depth (Hamelink 2004: 56). Finally, the press coverage in the run-up to the 2003 war with Iraq did little to undermine Washington’s mendacious tales, whereas a firm majority of the population opposed the illegal war (chapter 5).

Conclusion Curran’s radical perspective constitutes a fruitful frame for understanding the historical trajectory of the media in the Netherlands (and possibly also in other Continental European countries), because it avoids the trap of the liberal perspective, which assumes that professional, market-driven journalism by and large serves the public interest. Until the 1960s the Dutch media were subservient to politics. Subsequently the primacy of politics was exchanged for that of commerce. Depillarization led to some improvements in journalism. By adhering to the principles of professionalism and objectivity, journalism attained a substantial degree of autonomy from politics, certainly in comparison to the age of pillarization. Yet in the process of semi-emancipation from politics, journalism became more and more beholden to commercial interests, which were already powerful before WWII. A radical reading of Dutch media history coincides with a liberal reading by agreeing that pillarized journalism served the powers that be. But it starkly departs from the liberal perspective by pointing out that the available research and scholarship make plausible that Dutch journalism since the 1970s has suffered from the same structural flaws as its professional, market-driven Anglo-American counterparts, although likely not to the same degree. This chapter points to a puzzling paradox. Why do historical interpretations of the Dutch media adopt a liberal framework in the face of so much evidence pointing to the viability of a radical reading? Evidence, moreover, that is often presented by the same scholars who reject a radical reading. There are no clear-cut answers, but one can speculate. Characteristic of the scholarship is that it has been unable to transcend the paradigm of pillarization vs. professionalism. Journalism during pillarization was obviously flawed; the professional journalism that succeeded it was in some ways an improvement and therefore almost automatically regarded by scholars as also adequate on its own terms. It should also be remembered that market-driven journalism comes in many degrees. In the Netherlands it ascended gradually (certainly compared to many other countries) and only truly came into its own in the 1990s. Moreover, the trend of specialization in academia has resulted in fragmented scholarship that is less likely to look beyond the boundaries of a single discipline. Concretely, this means that there exists somewhat of a rift between social-scientific content analyses and historical analyses. Another possible reason for the too positive evaluation of modern Dutch journalism might be that it probably compares favorably to its British and American counterparts. What has been lacking is the willingness to measure Dutch journalism by a normative standard that transcends narrow temporal or geographic comparisons (pillarized vs. professional journalism; the Netherlands vs. the US). For all their perceptiveness and often exemplary scholarship, scholars have analyzed the Dutch media from within a social-democratic framework infused with a strong dose of moral relativism. WWII and the Cold War taught many to distrust any and all kinds of ‘extremism.’ Scholars’ prevailing political centrism can be gleaned from the virtual absence in the scholarship of the recognition of the deep crisis in Dutch democracy, which is nonetheless well-documented (Schinkel 2012; Van Doorn 2009; Van Westerloo 2003; chapter 7). This crisis puts the lie to claims that the Dutch media have served democracy in any meaningful definition of the term. Thus, a relativist attitude and also probably nationalist sentiments arguably undergird much of the scholarship. Though such an attitude brings into sharp focus certain aspects of reality, it tends to exclude the viability of a radical reading of Dutch media history from its purview.

3. The Forgotten Political Economists Based on a literature review and interviews with scholars,2 this chapter recaptures and evaluates the political-economic approach to the Dutch media in the 1970s. During that period, this approach comprised a significant, but certainly not dominant, part of the public and scholarly debates on the Dutch media. Scholars and journalists urgently addressed a core problem of journalism in the twentieth century, namely the tensions that its commercial underpinnings create with its avowed task in a democracy. In the 1980s, the political-economic perspective all but disappeared. This chapter thus aims to draw attention to an episode in the history of the study of the Dutch media that has been forgotten in the Netherlands and is unknown abroad. Additionally, this chapter argues for the revival of the political-economic perspective, because commercial imperatives currently have a much stronger hold on the Dutch media than they did forty years ago, for instance as a result of the introduction of commercial broadcasting and the increased emphasis on profit maximization in the newspaper industry. A reinvigorated political-economic perspective can shed considerable light on the crisis in which Dutch journalism finds itself today and can point to constructive ways forward. This chapter is structured as follows: first, it points out that a political-economic critique of the Dutch media did not first arise in the 1970s, but instead has a long historical pedigree; it then examines the political-economic strand that emerged in the late 1960s; subsequently, it documents the absence of the political economy approach from the 1980s onward; and it concludes by suggesting some causes for the disappearance of this approach and argues that it is now more salient than ever.

Political-economic critiques before the 1970s Political-economic criticisms of the Dutch media go back much further than the 1970s. Quite possibly, although this cannot be known for sure without further archival research, many salient criticisms from the period before WWII deserve to be excavated. The radical-democratic publications at the end of the nineteenth century and the communist party newspaper might prove fertile hunting grounds. So, too, might union publications. Here, two brief examples illustrate these historical roots. Since the establishment of unions in the Netherlands, the biased manner in which the mainstream press covered strikes was “regularly” the topic of “polemics.” One of the reasons for launching the labor newspaper Het Volksdagblad in 1885 was the hostile treatment workers claimed to receive in the “bourgeois” press (Van den Berg and Van der Veer 1986: 1, 6, note 2). A second example: the Dutch underground press in WWII blamed the widespread collaboration with the German occupying forces by the mainstream press on the profit motive. The magazine Vrij Nederland (1942: 616) editorialized that It is clear that it should no longer be possible that a spiritually and nationally important possession like a big newspaper can be treated not from the perspective of the public interest, but simply as any other economic undertaking. It is bad enough that our factories have to produce weapons and ammunition for the enemy. That newspaper companies of their own accord offer their services to the enemy in order to further their financial interest is a horrible phenomenon, which should forever be made impossible.

The criticisms articulated by laborers and the underground press can be called “radical” for “they see the source of the problem not in the incompetence or selfish nature of individuals, but, rather, in the industrial structures and the logic of commerce that make such journalism their necessary product” (McChesney and Scott 2004: 4). Because of the emphasis on structural explanations for journalists’ behavior and news content, this kind of criticism can also be termed ‘political-economic’ (Mosco 1996). In the 1970s, the term ‘critical’ was commonly employed as a synonym for political-economic. This chapter uses these terms – radical, political-economic and critical – interchangeably.

The critical perspective in the 1970s In Dutch scholarship, a political-economic strand of media analysis arose in the late 1960s when, according to Joan Hemels, a small number of young academics grew concerned about the strong trend towards concentration in the newspaper industry. Their interests reflected the spirit of the times. Marxism was in vogue. These academics wanted to do research that was relevant to society, according to Jan Bierhoff, in order to counter the often abstract nature of the prevalent scholarship. Also, the existing research focused on politics; the influence of economics on the media was a blind spot. Intellectually, the critical strand built on work by Karl Marx, The Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci, and could be characterized as a “neo-Marxist, political-economic take on the effect of structural capitalist ownership of media on their hegemonic and status quo confirming content,” in Kees Brants’s formulation. In his view, the Dutch critical scholars were theoretically more sophisticated than their American counterparts, yet the Americans have subsequently shown more “perseverance” and have produced more – and more sophisticated – empirical research to back up their claims. The Dutch political economists of the 1970s took the following positions. They denounced journalistic objectivity as a conservative ideology that primarily served the interests of newspaper owners; they warned against the increasing market orientation of the media; they argued that the commercial papers were biased in favor of political and economic elites and against labor and dissenters; they denounced the pillarized media system, which was breaking down, as authoritarian; and they argued that regulatory changes in the public broadcasting system had resulted in a veiled commercial system in which the quest for high ratings was paramount. Employing Marxist terminology and regularly referencing the German original of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, these political economists devised plans for restructuring the media landscape so that it would serve the public better. One plan envisioned the seminationalization of printing facilities (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 28). The critical scholars tried to influence media policy, recalls Peter Vasterman. They urged the Netherlands Association of Journalists (NVJ) to increase efforts to win concessions from the organization of newspaper owners (NDP), including the introduction of editorial statutes, which were to guarantee journalistic independence vis-à-vis management. This effort was successful. The extent of the critical strand’s impact at the time is debatable. According to Brants, the critical scholars stimulated discussion on press concentration and also were a factor in prodding the government to enact policy to counter this trend and provide support to struggling media outlets. The concerns about press concentration led to the establishment in 1974 of a public fund for the press: the so-called Bedrijfsfonds voor de Pers, later renamed the Stimuleringsfonds voor de Pers. A distinct weakness of the critical strand was that only few content analyses were undertaken to demonstrate that the asserted biases in media content in favor of the interests of political and economic elites did, in fact, exist. Moreover, the studies that were done were, according to Vasterman, methodologically unsophisticated. A third possible objection to the critical strand is the whiff of left-wing dogmatism that pervades its publications. The book Perskoncentratie3 (Press Koncentration, 1972) was probably the highpoint of the critical strand. It was written at the request of the Amsterdam division of the NVJ, remembers

Hemels, and published by the socialist publisher SUN in Nijmegen. The Werkgroep Perskoncentratie, an ensemble of journalists, scholars, and instructors and students at the journalism school in Utrecht, authored the book. The school was established in 1966 as the first professional journalism school in the Netherlands. Around 1970 it was a hotbed of leftist thought (svjgeschiedenis.nl). The Werkgroep Perskoncentratie consisted of more than a dozen people. A prominent member was Jan Rogier, a journalist at the leftist magazine Vrij Nederland. Another member was his colleague, Rudie Van Meurs, who would become a much-respected investigative journalist. The group also included scholar Ben Manschot and Hans Niemantsverdriet, an instructor at the journalism school. Two other authors, Hanneke Acker and Bert Determeijer, were students. They went on to become journalists at mainstream publications and instructors at their old school. The Werkgroep Perskoncentratie provided a coherent political-economic analysis of the Dutch media. The argument was made that the “bourgeois press” had become “an instrument… in the service of the existing power relations.” The result was that the press was not able to perform its self-proclaimed function of serving the public and democracy. Its actual function was to hide reality from the public (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 9). The authors took an historical approach to the study of the media, “because only a thorough analysis of the genesis and development of the press and its function offers insight in the contemporary problem of the press and can clarify what needs to be done” (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 15). Chapter 2 of the book, “Development to a monopoly press,” provided an overview of the history of the press. It remains an exceptional text in that it does not frame Dutch press history as a natural and desirable progression from partisanship to professionalism (chapter 2). The chapter emphasized the negatives of the market’s influence on journalism. The abolition in 1869 of the heavy taxes on newspapers opened up the market. Publishers strove “for the hand of the readers primarily in order to acquire as a reward the kiss of the advertiser” (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 35-6). The authors discussed the then-occurring wave of concentration in the newspaper industry; remarked upon the considerable influence of foreign news agencies and the Dutch national news agency (ANP); denounced journalistic objectivity as reproducing capitalist ideology; and discussed Marx’s concept of ideology, noting that “he was one of the first who clearly saw that not just a person can fool himself, but that a society as a whole can do so too” (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 131). Journalists, the authors charged, wrongly regarded the press as basically autonomous from larger societal forces and therefore failed to see that its conduct was in fact determined by, and in turn upheld, the wider political economy. Journalists needed to realize that they were laborers; they needed to make common cause with the rest of the labor force in the struggle against employers (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 33). After a discussion of contemporary plans to reform the press, the authors concluded that none of them got at the root of the problem. Many commentators built their analyses on questionable assumptions: that employers and employees have the same interests and that the state is a neutral institution whose support for the media would have no drawbacks. In fact, the authors pointed out, the state was “intimately entangled in monopoly capital.” Therefore, the state, which had at its disposal an array of “increasingly subtle control mechanisms” for maintaining “social peace,” could be expected to regularly take the side of the employers (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 155). In an apparent reference to Habermas, the authors proposed that an alternative or counter public sphere be set up as an antidote to the public sphere dominated by the capitalist media. It would be foolish to

assume, they argued, that a well-functioning, independent media system is possible in a capitalist society: “A socialist press is only to be realized in a socialist society.” Nonetheless, it wasn’t all black and white. A “large number of relatively independent” media organizations was preferable to a monopolistic market. Thus, there was room for improvement within the capitalist structure. Initiatives that stimulated editorial rooms to be “as autonomous as possible” should be supported (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 142). A second major publication in the critical strand was Marges in de Media (Margins in the Media, 1975). Authors Jo Bardoel, Jan Bierhoff, Ben Manschot and Peter Vasterman provided a lucid treatment of the ideological limits and commercial logic that characterized the broadcasting system. The book was the first attempt to describe the effect of economics on broadcasting. Until then, according to Vasterman, the literature had exclusively focused on political aspects. This blind spot was to some extent understandable, as the Netherlands was unique in that the broadcasting organizations were run by the main groups in society, which through their political parties also dominated parliament and the executive branch. In the 1970s, a number of developments challenged the view that politics was paramount, according to Vasterman. Economic aspects became more important, as illustrated by the introduction of glossy magazines and market research and the folding of many independent newspapers. In the late 1960s, regulatory changes allowed for commercials on public television and opened up the broadcasting system to new organizations, with the effect that broadcasters were forced into competition with each other for ratings and members. By documenting the failure of three radio and television programs that aimed to give laborers a voice, Marges in de Media argued that by the mid-1970s one could not realistically expect the broadcasting system to serve the interests of underprivileged sectors of society, for it primarily functioned according to a commercial logic. The public broadcasting organizations had retained some semblance of serving their traditional constituencies, but this impulse was trumped by the increasing demands of the market. Depillarization meant that notions of professionalism and objectivity became paramount to journalists at the expense of social engagement, providing context to the news, and serving the information needs of particular segments of the public. Despite the unique characteristics of the broadcasting system, the actual content produced was very similar to that in other countries. In other words, American “mediaimperialism” had succeeded (Bardoel et al. 1975: 61-2). The authors called for further democratization of the media, for a media system that had firm roots in communities (Bardoel et al. 1975: 11). Constructive ways forward could be establishing a counter public sphere and a new broadcaster, as well as putting pressure on the existing broadcasters to change their ways (Bardoel et al. 1975: 179).4 A sense of how prevalent radicalism was among Dutch journalists is provided by a survey in the mid-1970s, which showed that the large majority of them had no confidence in the efficacy of private control over the media. More than three out of four journalists were wary of profit-making mandates, which they regarded as the cause of industry concentration, a trend they believed to be detrimental to their profession (Deuze 2004: 83). The Netherlands Association of Journalists (NVJ) became more militant in negotiations with the organization of newspaper owners (NDP) and even argued that, in due course, newspapers should become independent of advertisers (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 20, 24-5). The adoption of editorial statutes, which were to guarantee independence from the management side of newspapers, was successfully demanded. The NDP fought back, especially against the demand made by some NVJ-members that decision-making power should solely rest in the

hands of the journalists themselves, not with management. On that issue, the NDP came out on top. The adopted template editorial statute only established an advisory role for employees (Rogier et al. 1985: 42-3). Yet at Vrij Nederland the fight for democratic control was won. The journalists at the leftist magazine got to decide on the editorial course themselves (Rogier et al. 1985: 39). The main trade magazine, De Journalist, published quite a number of critical articles, according to Brants. One article asserted that advertising had been “a political instrument, a choice for a conservative or at best a choice for a neutral press” and against an “engaged or progressive press” that had the audacity to question the corporate foundations of society. The article noted the important role that market mechanisms had played in the disappearance of many a progressive publication (Hamelink 1978: 25). Journalist Paul Brill, who in later decades would make a decided shift to the right of the political spectrum, nonetheless in the 1970s argued that “As long as papers are… primarily economic units and are functioning under the laws of the free market economy, costreduction… and concentration will beat out editorial independence, intensive news provision” and the fair representation of a broad spectrum of opinion (Hamelink 1978: 98). Newspaper Trouw urged the minister responsible for press policy to devise plans for a system in which economic motives would not be paramount (Van den Heuvel 1981: 116). Journalist Jan Tromp wrote a critical book about the advent of cable in the Netherlands. In Gekonkel om de Kabel (Intrigue over Cable, 1974), he agitated against the threat of commercial interests taking over the new technology. Tromp sardonically trashed claims that providing accurate and relevant information with the aim of furthering democracy could be commensurate with profit aims. Approvingly referencing Karl Marx and American political economist Herbert Schiller, Tromp asserted that under capitalism the media legitimize and reinforce the exploitations that are the essence of that economic system. Commercial broadcasting he regarded as “infantile,” for it aimed to keep the people “stupid” and thus achieved the opposite of what the media are supposed to do (Tromp 1974: 34-9). Tromp noted that media concentration and conglomeration was no longer a “typical American phenomenon” but could also be seen in England, Germany and indeed the Netherlands (Tromp 1974: 44). The solution was to be found in an “egalitarian, truly democratizing use of the medium [of cable] through… a bottom-up approach.” Cable could serve as an emancipating medium, but only if the “People” with a capital ‘p’ took control (Tromp 1974: 8). Were citizens allowed to produce their own local programs, they would transform themselves from consumers to producers and political participation would be revitalized (Tromp 1974: 99-100). Indeed, on a local level, for instance in Zaltbommel and Enschede, citizen collectives experimented with making their own television programs. After a number of years these initiatives collapsed, in part because “commerce had other interests,” according to Bierhoff. In “The commercial value of a spiritual good,” a chapter in the standard textbook Media in Nederland, Rogier et al. (1985: 28) asserted that, in a commercial media system, the “journalistic policy” of a paper is in the end subservient to the “economic laws” by which the newspaper company has to abide. The authors blamed the downfall of the social-democratic newspaper Het Vrije Volk (The Free People), in part, on the lack of advertiser interest due to the relative poverty of its readers. Nonetheless, the paper was widely read. Between the world wars it was for a while the largest paper in the Netherlands (Werkgroep Perskoncentratie 1972: 46). In 1961, its circulation, including many regional editions, still numbered some 352 thousand (Rogier et al. 1985: 31). Yet the paper started to lose money, was purchased in 1972 and became a regional paper focused on Rotterdam. The

dismantling of Het Vrije Volk can be seen as an example of the censorship mechanisms, especially of left-wing voices, inherent in a commercial media system (Curran 1978). The chapter last appeared in the 1985 edition of the textbook. It was dropped and never reinstated – a sign of the shifting ideological climate, according to Hemels. The textbook’s editors, Bardoel and Bierhoff, cut the chapter in part because they felt that the critical analysis it offered was stated too categorically, according to the latter. They no longer were of the opinion that such certitude was warranted. The year 1985 might therefore be considered the end of the critical period. It deserves emphasis that there was an international dimension to the Dutch critical strand. According to Van Ginneken, changes in the political and cultural climate throughout the West, from the ‘Sixties’ to the pro-business backlash in the 1980s, underpinned the strand’s rise and fall. Dutch radicals were influenced not just by the international ideological climate but also by specific scholars from abroad. A memorable example of such foreign inspiration was Herbert Schiller’s visiting professorship at the University of Amsterdam in academic year 1973-1974. The American scholar enjoyed the experience and engaged in “active exchanges with students,” remembers his son Dan Schiller. Herbert Schiller first met Cees Hamelink in that period. They established a friendship and working relationship that lasted until the former’s death in 2000 (Hamelink 2001: 11). Schiller’s work was also an early influence on Van Ginneken. Dutch scholars built on critical work done in Germany, for instance by Habermas and the Frankfurt School in general. The German influence was facilitated by the shared border between the Netherlands and Germany, as well as by the similarities between the Dutch and German languages, at a time when English was not quite yet the lingua franca of academic communication that it later became. Conversely, the Dutch critical strand did not influence international scholarship, because its publications were in Dutch and because of its short lifespan. Where did the political economists of the 1970s end up? Tromp and Brill became prominent journalists at the progressive quality newspaper de Volkskrant. The former adopted a center-left political orientation, whereas the latter moved over to the center-right. Other critical observers embarked on successful academic careers. Bardoel (University of Amsterdam and University of Nijmegen) became a leading authority on broadcasting policy and Brants (University of Amsterdam and Leiden University) a leading authority on political communication. Hemels, who did not selfidentify as a critical scholar but did engage in the debate, had a prolific career as a press historian at the University of Amsterdam. Vasterman taught at the journalism school in Utrecht. After finishing his dissertation on media hypes (2004) he became an assistant professor in media studies at the University of Amsterdam. Bierhoff worked at the journalism school in Utrecht and later became director at the European Centre for Digital Communication at Zuyd University in Maastricht. Ben Manschot was an associate professor at the University of Amsterdam, with a research focus on television, when he passed away in the mid-1990s. Jan Rogier died in the mid-1980s. Hans Niemantsverdriet remained an instructor at the journalism school into the 1980s, but according to Bierhoff he found himself increasingly marginalized. He died in 2007 (svjgeschiedenis.nl). The journalism school in Utrecht functioned as a refuge for a period, but as Bierhoff notes there were “no natural employment” opportunities for critical journalists. Most political economists of the 1970s abandoned their radical convictions.5 Brants, author of the critical Journalistiek Ondersteboven (Journalism Upside Down, 1974), claims to “still believe in the structural dangers of specific media ownership structures, but less in the self-evidence of its

(sic) effects.” In his opinion, the editorial statutes provided an effective barrier against the capitalist media structure exerting a strong influence on content. In this reading, the critical tradition could dissolve because it had largely accomplished its goals. Others, like Marcel Broersma, regard the statutes as a dead letter, especially in tough economic times (also Greven 2004: 13-4). In retrospect, according to Brants, the “weakness” of the critical strand was “the underlying disposition to a conspiracy theory, that capitalist media systems are built on profit maximization and, hence, produce capitalist content.” On this issue, Brants directly disagrees with, for instance, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, who dispute that their analysis in Manufacturing Consent (1988, 2002) amounts to a conspiracy theory. There is certainly nothing secretive about the legally-mandated obligation of corporations to strive for profit maximization, and the propaganda model does not assume that journalists consciously produce news that benefits elite interests (Pedro 2011a and b). Herman and Chomsky’s elaborate content analyses show that the American media are biased in favor of elite interests, a conclusion which is, in fact, quite common among scholars who study foreign affairs reporting in the American media (chapter 1). Jo Bardoel also became a political moderate. He once believed in the ideal of “total participatory democracy,” but he has come to realize that paid professionals are necessary to unearth facts and help orchestrate public debate (Bardoel 2010). One might wonder, though, whether there is by definition no place for professional journalists in a (never “total”) participatory democracy (chapter 8). Vasterman and Bierhoff now argue that in the 1970s they overestimated the dangers posed by press concentration. This development turned out to also have positive aspects. For instance, large media outlets have substantial resources available to spend on improving journalistic quality. Their analyses in the 1970s were one-sided and one-dimensional and therefore of only limited value, Vasterman and Bierhoff have come to believe. Although commercialism plays a role in directing the behavior of the media, to Vasterman’s mind it constitutes only one among many factors. Since the 1970s, journalistic quality has improved, not deteriorated, and the ideological spectrum of opinion presented in the media is broader now than it was in the 1970s, according to Bierhoff. Practical considerations (e.g. deadlines) provide more salient explanations for journalists’ behavior than ideology or structural constraints. Uncritical reporting can often be explained by simple laziness, instead of by the structure in which journalists operate. Moreover, the effects of the media on the public are not as direct as once assumed. The public has emancipated itself from the powers that be and is not easily duped, Bierhoff believes.

The 1980s and beyond Since the mid-1980s, the dearth of scholarship on the Dutch media from an explicit politicaleconomic perspective is profound. A coherent political-economic perspective that emphasizes economic factors and structural causes in explaining media behavior has also hardly been present in the public debates. The critical strand of the 1970s has been forgotten. This is unfortunate. For the result is that what remains is a winner’s history in which the foundation of the media system disappears from sight. Such a history tends to downplay the large influence that commercialism has had on the Dutch media landscape, not just in the most recent decades but throughout the twentieth century, and it ignores the marginalization of left-wing voices as a result of market mechanisms. Moreover, a solid argument can be made that Dutch journalism is currently in crisis and that the single most important cause is the increased commercialization of the media. A political-economic analysis should therefore be part of the debates on the future of Dutch journalism. Only a couple of scholars stuck to their critical perspective after the 1970s. Cees Hamelink is the most obvious case in point. Major themes in his work have been the dangers of the increasing commercialization of the media; the fundamental problems associated with relying on profit-driven transnational corporations as providers of news and information; and the inequalities in communication opportunities between the Western and non-Western world. Hamelink has continued to argue that the “economic order” is intimately intertwined with the “information order,” with the consequence that “fundamental changes in the way in which information is produced and spread are only possible when the monopolized economic power is redistributed” (Hamelink 1978: 143-4). Often addressing a general audience, Hamelink has adopted as one of his basic premises the need for further democratization of media policymaking, observing that, in the formation of global communication policy, the interests of the bulk of the world population are hardly taken into account. Asserting a key tenet of a political-economic approach to the study of communication, namely an explicit moral framework (Mosco 1996), Hamelink (1994: 2-3) has argued that “scientific work should contribute to the protection and promotion of human rights standards.” Despite his international prominence, Hamelink’s influence on the scholarship and public debate on the Dutch media is limited. Most of his books, especially his later ones, appeared only in English and concerned mainly global communication issues, not the Dutch media specifically. An exception is Regeert de Leugen? (Does the Lie Govern? 2004) in which Hamelink argued that the Dutch media are ill-equipped to unmask the many lies that float around in the information society. In fact, the media often provide liars with an uncritical platform. The biases found in the media are not random. The media usually adopt the government’s framing of events, for instance because the “media elite” has bought into the worldview that political elites espouse. To a media outlet, “it can be risky” from an economic perspective to take unpopular positions. Moreover, lack of time and competitive pressures work to exclude other perspectives, as investigative journalism is expensive (Hamelink 2004: 75-6). It would be foolish, according to Hamelink (2004: 51), to expect the media to significantly improve in the absence of structural changes in the media system: As long as the media have to function under the pressure of the clock and the competition in the media market, a far-reaching improvement is an illusion. The problems are situated in the people and in the system and fundamental improvement is for both an unrealistic desire.

This quote illustrates that Hamelink takes a somewhat more moderate (and pessimistic) position than political economists like McChesney, Herman and Chomsky, who point to the structure within which journalists work as the culprit, arguing that when good journalism gets done, it is typically because individual journalists defy the system in which they work. In contrast, Hamelink puts some of the blame on journalists themselves. Perhaps significantly, Hamelink’s analyses in the 1970s and 1980s were more strident in tone than later on. Another scholar who has remained critical is Jaap Van Ginneken. Although he already had a job at the University of Amsterdam in the 1960s, he only finished his dissertation in 1989, after a long period working in Paris as a journalist. In some of his publications during that period (e.g. 1977), he perhaps identified too closely with socialist and communist movements. When he finally received his PhD, he was “too tainted as a radical to become full professor… So I settled for keeping a part-time job at the university and pursuing my own (mostly book) projects along the side, again living in France most of the time.” Initially, Van Ginneken “identified rather closely” with American political economists of the media like Herbert Schiller. Yet he later realized that the situation in the Netherlands was different from the US, where “the use of power is much more open and naked.” He also came around to the view that “political economy is only one part of the story.” His Understanding Global News (1998) and Screening Difference (2007), although texts in the critical tradition, examine the media not just from a political-economic perspective but adopt a whole range of approaches, including linguistic and philosophical. As with Hamelink, the study of the Dutch media has been a small component of Van Ginneken’s work. An exception is a short essay published in an edited volume (Ummelen 2009) in which he points out that the Dutch media system has become thoroughly commercialized. Advertisers’ monies have become the most influential source of media income, with the result that “consumption propaganda” easily drowns out “critical analyses.” Van Ginneken shows a keen awareness of some of the problems that the current Dutch media system faces: increased pressure on not just the press but also public broadcasting to follow the commercial logic; dependence on foreign media, especially Anglo-American, and capitalist investors; the speeding up of the news cycle; and the increasing focus on gossip and celebrity news. Yet he takes a relatively mild position toward the commercial underpinnings of the news media. According to Van Ginneken, “there is nothing wrong with commercialism and advertising,” as long as the “diversity” of the media remains “guaranteed” (Ummelen 2009: 103). A third scholar who has retained his critical perspective, Teun Van Dijk, was only tangentially connected to the critical strand of the 1970s. He nonetheless deserves mention, because his academic trajectory illustrates the marginalization of the critical perspective in Dutch scholarship since the 1980s. In 1980, Van Dijk started to study racist discourse. His conclusion in Minderheden in de Media (Minorities in the Media, 1983) that racism was prevalent in the Dutch news generated a lot of flak, as he later recalled (2004: 24): The study of racism was generally met with downright hostility in the Netherlands. Financial support for this kind of research was very hard, if not impossible to get, also for my assistants and PhD students working on this topic. The Dutch elites, not least the scholars and journalists, did not want to be “accused” of racism – and further ignored the data that proved otherwise.

In an attempt to promote critical scholarship, Van Dijk played a leading role in establishing CRITICS (Centers for Research into Text/Talk, Information, and Communication in Society) in the early 1990s. The organization was supported by, among others, Cees Hamelink and British critical

scholar John Downing. Although the initiative would ultimately languish, Van Dijk’s involvement shows his commitment to the critical perspective. Van Dijk left his position as professor of discourse studies at the University of Amsterdam to take a job at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His decision to leave the Netherlands was primarily a personal one. Yet “the attacks of my work on racism – and more generally the lack of interest in CDA [critical discourse analysis] in the Netherlands – were another good reason to leave.” As with Hamelink and Van Ginneken, Van Dijk’s work since the 1980s has hardly addressed the Dutch media specifically. The Netherlands currently boasts no publications that analyze the mainstream media from a radical perspective, although articles in that vein do, on occasion, appear on little-known websites (globalinfo.nl; mediakritisch.wordpress.com; ravage-webzine.nl). In contrast to the US, the Netherlands has no alternative press – an obvious source of media criticism – to speak of. A publication that, exceptionally, was primarily devoted to radical media criticism was the short-lived Extra! (2001-2004).6 Named after the magazine published by the American media watchdog, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), it was set up by activists Edwin Grooters, Martin Hulsing and Patrick Pubben. The circulation was in the hundreds of copies. The editors, including at one point the author of this book, were volunteers. The magazine’s lack of success and its quick demise were, to some extent, due to the following factors: the inability to attract advertisers or sufficient funding from other sources; its amateurish layout; a lack of organizational skills on the part of the editors; and the sometimes tense dynamics within a small editorial board. When Martin Hulsing, who was the driving force behind the magazine, quit for personal reasons, the magazine was dead. Taking a broader perspective, the magazine failed because of the lack of receptiveness of the wider cultural context in which it operated. There were not enough knowledgeable writers willing to regularly contribute without remuneration. Much of the support for the magazine came from the Amsterdam squatter movement. The social milieu it primarily spoke to was not strong enough (i.e. lacked the resources) to sustain a high-quality platform for media criticism. Nonetheless, a considerable amount of insightful work was produced (e.g. Windgassen and Hulsing 2003).

Conclusion The disappearance of the Dutch critical perspective coincided with the rise to prominence of neoliberalism throughout the Western world, although in the Netherlands its ascendancy came later and has been less pronounced than in the US and Great Britain (Chavannes 2009). In the 1980s, many radical observers moved toward the political center. The few scholars who retained their radicalism largely abandoned the study of the Dutch media. The critical tradition was defeated, in part, by the central problem it identified: the (increasing) dominance of capitalist logic and ideology in the media, higher education and society at large. Taking a broader perspective, the marginal existence of radical (media) critiques in the Netherlands in the twentieth century, the modest upsurge in the 1970s notwithstanding, can partly be explained by the political pressures exerted on the media to refrain from espousing radical left-wing views during pillarization (chapter 2) and by the commercial logic on which the Dutch media have operated, especially since the 1970s. Moreover, despite its progressive reputation abroad regarding issues like abortion and the death penalty, Dutch society in the twentieth century has hardly been amenable to radical left-wing politics, certainly in comparison to countries like France and Italy. Although the Dutch Communist Party enjoyed a brief upsurge in popularity directly after WWII, established Dutch politics was “resoundingly anticommunist in outlook” and remained so (ScottSmith 2007: 290). The Netherlands, which until WWII attempted to remain neutral in foreign affairs, became a loyal ally of the US (Wesseling 1980: 130-1). Another cause of the demise of the critical strand and its permanent disappearance could be that it was a strange bedfellow within Dutch communication scholarship, which resembles its American counterpart in many ways, for instance in that its orientation is predominantly social-scientific. The articles in the Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap, the flagship journal of Dutch communication scholarship, are similar to those in the mainstream American journals, for instance as to methodology (Zwier et al. 2006: 225). The political-economic approach clashes with that dominant, social-scientific paradigm. Social science tends to downplay the relevance of historical explanations and analyses, whereas an historical perspective is fundamental to political-economic approaches. Moreover, political economists adopt a holistic approach to the study of the media, typically regarding the media as reflecting society’s power structures. In contrast, social science tends to slice up reality in small pieces that lend themselves to be examined with its methodologies. Social science typically produces small, fragmented truths and tends to lose sight of Hegel’s dictum that the “truth is the whole” (Baran and Sweezy 1966: 1-3; Mills 1959). This in part explains the paradox that a significant amount of social-scientific studies on the Dutch media provide support for the viability of a political-economic framework, which nonetheless is absent from the scholarship. Anglo-American scholars have probably put more emphasis on power as a factor in explaining the media than have their Dutch counterparts. Since the 1970s, the critical tradition has exerted a “significant influence” on Anglo-American scholarship (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 82-3, note 3), whereas in the Netherlands it virtually disappeared. The Dutch critical analyses of the 1970s closely followed the political-economic analyses of the American media. Indeed, it stands to reason that the main conclusions drawn by American political economists also hold for the Netherlands, although not with the same force. Many Dutch political economists of the 1970s have disavowed their analyses, yet it is logical to assume that these were substantially valid then, the by now archaic-sounding

Marxist jargon and lack of empirical research notwithstanding. It also stands to reason that these analyses are much more valid now due to the increased commercialization of the Dutch media. Certainly in this day and age of hyper-commercialism and neoliberalism, a communication field that lacks a coherent political-economic perspective lacks balance.

4. A Dutch Propaganda Model This chapter argues that a successful model in the American tradition of political economy of the news media, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s propaganda model, is germane to the study of Dutch journalism. In fact, its applicability has been increasing as a result of the current crisis in Dutch journalism. After describing the propaganda model and pointing to its continuing relevance and applicability outside of the US, the current Dutch media landscape is examined for the presence of the five filters. Subsequently, existing research is summarized that supports the viability of a Dutch propaganda model. Then it is shown that the model’s second order prediction, namely that the model itself will be neglected in scholarship and the public debate, also holds for the Netherlands. The propaganda model provides the theoretical basis for the analyses of the coverage of the Iraq war in chapters 5 and 6, and the examination in chapter 7 of the press reactions to the proposal in 2011 for a Greek referendum on the euro crisis.

The propaganda model The propaganda model as described by Herman and Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent (1988, 2002) identifies five filters which distort the news in the US, perhaps most obviously foreign and economic news, in concord with the interests of political and economic elites. This bias results from concentrated, private ownership of the media (the first filter), the dependence on advertisers (the second filter), the sourcing practices of professional journalism and the orchestrated pr-efforts of the powers that be (the third filter), the ability of powerful institutions and persons to discipline the media through flak (the fourth filter), and the prevailing ideological climate (the fifth filter): anticommunism during the Cold War and pro-market ideology and arguably the ‘war on terror’ since. Through the study of “paired examples,” simultaneous events like elections and massacres which are similar except that some are organized or perpetrated by friendly governments, often with Washington’s support, and others by enemy governments, Herman and Chomsky show that the American media consistently privilege state and corporate narratives in explaining the world, despite much evidence deriving from more independent sources (e.g. human rights organizations) that provide a very different and more compelling description and explanation of events. In Herman and Chomsky’s ironic terminology, the media focus on and humanize “worthy victims,” those who are on the receiving end of crimes perpetrated by official enemies, at the expense of “unworthy victims,” the people whose lives are destroyed in the maintenance of US power. The media stick closely to official explanations and points of view. Alternative views are filtered out and marginalized; the media set the limits of debate and overwhelmingly reflect only the discussions that rage among supposedly credible sources: political and economic managers. The propaganda model’s merits have been debated (Corner 2003; Entman 1990; Herman 2000; Herring and Robinson 2003; Klaehn 2003a and b, 2009; LaFeber 1988; Lang and Lang 2004a and b; Pedro 2011a and b). Here it is emphasized that its conclusions are hardly controversial within academia. Much research exists that, explicitly or implicitly, supports the model, especially for the US but also for other Western countries (Klaehn 2009: 49), for instance Canada (Klaehn 2005), Spain (Sierra and Vázquez 2006) and Britain (Goss 2013). “Leading US academics,” Eric Herring and Piers Robinson (2003: 554-5) argue, for instance Daniel Hallin (1989) and Lance Bennett (1990), consider the coverage of foreign events by the US media to be flawed in similar ways as described by the propaganda model: The standard liberal myth of the news media in the West – that it is independent of elite interests and provides the people with the information necessary to ensure that they can hold elites and in particular governments to democratic account – is rejected widely by academics who study the news media and US foreign policy… the most common and empirically substantiated perspective is that, with respect to coverage of US foreign policy, on balance, the US media serve elite interests and undermine democracy. The media do this by portraying the world in a way that tends to shape the perspective of those entering the political elite, generate public consent for or at least acquiescence to US foreign policy and make it difficult for the public to have access to information necessary to challenge the interests of the elite.

In recent years, journalism worldwide, including in the Netherlands, has been deeply and negatively affected by a range of developments: increased emphasis on the bottom line, media concentration, budget cutbacks both in commercial journalism and public broadcasting and the rise of digital technologies. These developments would lead one to suspect that the propaganda model now provides a more salient explanation of media performance than when it was introduced at the end of

the Cold War. For the influence of the market on journalism has undoubtedly increased and the internet has not made good on its promise of spawning an effective counter public sphere to the commercial media (Goss 2013; Herman 2000; Herman and Chomsky 2002; McChesney 2013; Mullen 2009; Pedro 2011a and b).

Applying the propaganda model outside the US Some scholars have postulated that the propaganda model is only applicable to US because other countries have different political and media systems (Corner 2003; Goodwin 1994; Sparks 2007). For instance, national-socialist and social-democratic parties have had very little sway in the US, as opposed to in many European countries. The range of established political parties is wider in Europe; therefore media content too can be expected to be ideologically more diverse. The US has a weak tradition of public broadcasting, again as opposed to many European countries. Differences in regulatory regimes and in the “range and profile of the press system” might indeed diminish the relevance of the propaganda model outside the US (Corner 2003: 367-8). But not eradicate. As Joan Pedro (2011b: 1909) argues, “In the United States, as the hegemonic center of the world system where capitalism and the mechanisms of power are more developed, the influence of [the] filters is greater, but in other countries with similar characteristics, this influence is also evident.”

The first filter: Ownership The press The propaganda model’s “crucial structural factors derive from the fact that the dominant media are firmly embedded in the market system” (Herman 2000: 102). Therefore, the first filter, ownership, is the most important. At first glance one might assume that this filter, and also the second one, the reliance on advertisers for funding, are hardly germane to the Netherlands, with its strong tradition of public broadcasting. Yet a closer look reveals that the Dutch media are deeply entrenched in the market. With the exception of the public broadcasting organizations the Dutch media too “are profitseeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); and they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their advertisements to appear in a supportive selling environment” (Herman 2000: 102). The Dutch print media are privately owned and the newspaper industry is highly concentrated. With a combined share of 80 percent, three corporations dominated the regional and national newspaper markets in early 2013. The publicly-traded Telegraaf Media Groep (TMG) is the largest publisher with a market share of 37 percent (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 61-2). TMG owns the country’s most popular newspaper, De Telegraaf, and the free papers Spits! and Metro. They are the fourth and second largest newspapers respectively. Much of their content consists of copy provided by the ANP. According to journalists working at the papers pr-material is a “very important” resource too (Prenger et al. 2011: 3). TMG also owns five regional newspapers, the largest producer of online videos, and several magazines and radio stations, including the popular Sky Radio (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 35). With about a third of the shares in its possession, the family Van Puijenbroek is in control of TMG. The family also owns textile producer Van Puijenbroek Textiel, which has been a steady supplier of the Dutch army since 1925. Military orders have provided the backbone of the financial health of the textile company, but the Van Puijenbroeks’ prosperity can also partly be attributed to “feudal exploitation” of, among others, farmers who rented their land. In the 1930s, the family was sympathetic to Mussolini’s fascism and supported right-wing authoritarian organizations. The family’s attitude towards workers and unions has been of an exceptional vindictiveness. At the end of WWII, when food was scarce, the family sometimes distributed potatoes to the poor. But it refused to hand out sustenance to workers who had participated in a strike forty years earlier (Van Amerongen and Brouwer 1995a). In the early 1950s the family took over De Telegraaf, presumably in an effort to thwart the social-democratic party PvdA, which the family suspected of wanting to nationalize its textile factories. De Telegraaf began defending wartime collaborators. For decades its ties to politicians in The Hague remained tight. It has successfully combined conservative politics (as shown by diatribes against immigrants, left-wing politicians and unions) with a clear eye on the bottom line. The firewall between the commercial and editorial sides has been a lot lower than at other papers (Van Amerongen and Brouwer 1995b). Tjitske Akkerman (2011: 931) found that, contrary perhaps to common perception, De Telegraaf does not exhibit an anti-elite bias, but in fact is “overall even more oriented towards elitist perspectives than the quality press.” Akkerman (2011: 938-9) suggested

that the differences between the popular and quality newspapers are perhaps mostly stylistic. The second biggest newspaper publisher in the Netherlands, the publicly-traded Mecom, is controlled by British insurance companies and investors. Mecom owns nine regional papers and has a market share of 23.5 percent. It also owns media in Denmark (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 42, 62). The third biggest newspaper publisher is Persgroep NV, a Belgian company wholly owned by the Van Thillo family, which amassed its fortune in part through colonial exploitation in the Congo. The company publishes newspapers and magazines in Flanders and holds a 50 percent stake in the biggest owner of commercial radio and television stations in that Belgian region. In the Netherlands, Persgroep NV owns the national papers Trouw, Algemeen Dagblad (including its many regional editions) and de Volkskrant. It also owns the local paper for Amsterdam, Het Parool, and a radio station (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 38-9). As a result of economic hard times, revenue from advertising has dropped precipitously. The online versions of papers attract many visitors but are hardly profitable. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, 5,310 jobs were lost in the newspaper industry. In 2010 the industry still provided work for 8,570 people (Rutten and Slot 2011: 13-4). Editors-in-chief have more and more become adjuncts to the publisher, partly as a result of the pressures arising from the dire financial situation of newspapers. This means that the business side has won in influence at the cost of the editorial side, with the inevitable result that market considerations have even further infiltrated the daily practice of journalism (Blokker 2010: 154). Yet the press has been and remains hardly regulated. Media policy in the Netherlands has been an exercise in modesty, as Jo Bardoel (2003a: 14-5) put it, because of freedom of the press concerns and because an ideological consensus on the issue has been lacking. In summary, the Dutch newspapers are securely in the hands of domestic and especially foreign elites that are legally obliged to strive for maximum profit. The newspaper sector is highly concentrated.

The news agencies The situation regarding the news agencies in the Netherlands is rather unique. The two agencies, ANP and Novum Nieuws, are both privately owned and run for profit. In all other European countries a national news agency exists which is controlled by media companies. No other European country has two news agencies that are in competition with each other. In about half of all European countries the national news agency receives direct or indirect state subsidies or the newspaper industry receives substantial state support, but not in the Netherlands. It is estimated that worldwide about three in four news agencies receive direct or indirect state subsidies (Rutten and Slot 2011: 4, 48). A widelydiscussed report documented how the two agencies are completely subject to the logic of market, stated that news has attributes of a public good and repeatedly brought up the issue of possible state support (Rutten and Slot 2011). The responsible minister replied publicly that she saw no compelling reason to reconsider the hands-off approach that has characterized government policy towards the news provision in society (Van Bijsterveldt-Vliegenthart 2011). In 2003, the private equity firms NPM Capital en Gimv acquired a majority stake in the ANP. Four years later they bought the remaining shares from the newspaper publishers. As one observer noted, the ANP formed a “perfect communication link between the multifaceted interests of NPM

Capital and the outside world.” He also noted that the ANP is very much aware that it is in the business of producing profits and that it is remarkable that the agency has retained its reputation of independence and objectivity (Dukker 2010). The ANP has increased its output in text and images by 40 percent (Rutten and Slot 2011: 24-5), whereas the number of editors and reporters has been reduced in order to cut costs (Vermaas and Janssen 2009: 13). The foreign news that the ANP disseminates originates from other Western news agencies. In the global news flows the “Euro-American dominance” is “overwhelming,” albeit diminishing, and the ANP is part of that dominance (Boyd-Barrett 2000: 12). It might be expected that its content suffers from a pro-Western bias. A pro-corporate bias might also be expected. The ANP does not just deliver news to the media but also to corporations like Shell and Fortis Bank (Vermaas and Janssen 2009: 17). The ANP teaches businesses how to write press releases (Rutten and Slot 2011: 33). In 2010, the ANP was taken over by V-Ventures, the investment branch of commercial broadcaster Veronica. The second news agency, Novum Nieuws, started in 1999 and has conquered a small segment of the market (Rutten and Slot 2011: 26). The agency focuses on providing entertainment news and radio bulletins. Novum’s foreign desk translates and edits copy from Associated Press. Twenty jobs were lost in 2008 but the agency regained ground thereafter (Rutten and Slot 2011: 34). The competition between ANP and Novum has had at least one effect: the ANP now also produces entertainment news (Vermaas and Janssen 2009: 23; Rutten and Slot 2011: 74). The conclusion is clear. As the news agencies are privately owned and run for profit, one would expect that on their count at least the propaganda model is germane to the Netherlands, in fact more so than in many other countries, including the US.

Broadcasting The foremost expert on Dutch broadcasting, Jo Bardoel (2008: 199-200), has summed up its historical development: The Dutch system of “segmented pluralism,” in which social groups and civil society play a vital role represents an interesting alternative to media systems relying mainly on either the state or the market. But at the beginning of a new century, this unique Dutch model is eroding rapidly and is starting to resemble a more European or even global media model in which liberal policies and commercial media markets dominate. Over the past two decades the Dutch media have changed almost completely, and public information has shifted from a merit-good to a market commodity, mainly as a result of liberalizing national and European broadcasting and telecommunications policies. Consequently, the Dutch television sector has become increasingly internationalized.

Policies promoted by the European Commission (EC) have resulted in private interests increasing their influence on the formulation of public broadcasting strategies. The interests of stakeholders other than private media companies are underrepresented. The EC’s “multi-stakeholder policy practices are far from inclusive and fail to meet several aspects of deliberative democracy. Essentially, they have been created in response to market pressures (and, hence, over-focus on market questions) and rarely take as their starting point the improvement of public service broadcasting as a democratic policy project” (Donders and Raats 2012: 162). The television market is, just like the newspaper market, dominated by three players: the public broadcaster, the German media behemoth Bertelsmann and the Finnish Sanoma Group. Together they control almost 90 percent of the national market (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 76). Bertelsmann

owns the RTL channels in the Netherlands through the RTL Group, which holds interests in dozens of television and radio channels throughout the world. Sanoma owns the SBS channels in the Netherlands. Thus, the biggest part of the television sector is owned by two foreign corporations and run for profit. The presence of public broadcasting organizations with a market share of about a third poses the strongest challenge to the propaganda model’s application to the Netherlands. Following Alex Doherty’s revision of the model to incorporate the BBC and thus make it relevant to the study of the British media, the argument here is that Dutch public broadcasting too “is not free at all, but is merely subject to different forms of control” (Doherty 2005). The public broadcasting organizations might not be profit-seeking enterprises, but of necessity they have been much preoccupied with cost saving, especially of late. They too are victim of the “commercial logic” of cost saving and output maximization (Davies 2009). The people leading the public broadcasting organizations hail from elite sectors of society. For instance, those in charge of the social-democratic broadcaster VARA hold such other jobs as lawyer or professor, or a leading position at an environmental group, a publisher or a pension fund, according to the VARA-website. Some are involved in one capacity or the other with the socialdemocratic party PvdA, for instance by occupying a seat in the Dutch senate. Doherty (2005) observed regarding the BBC, “For the most part, the members of the board are drawn from a narrow elite sector of society with intimate links to government and big business.” This goes for the Netherlands too. The main difference with Britain is that the Dutch state has no say in who gets appointed to lead the broadcasting organizations. Yet judging from the composition of its leadership, one would not expect the VARA to challenge the fundamental premises of Dutch economic or foreign policy. The same goes for the other broadcasting organizations. The daily public news shows, the Journaals, are not produced by the broadcasting organizations but by the NOS. The NOS is publicly funded but independently run. It has a statutory obligation to produce news in the public interest (Bardoel and D’Haenens 2008: 347). Nonetheless, the Journaal is hardly distinguishable from its commercial counterpart, RTL Nieuws. Aside from some real differences, there were “striking similarities” between the ways the public and commercial programs reported on the parliamentary elections in 1994 and 1998, according to Cees Van der Eijk: “Both reacted to the parties rather than trying to initiate news stories, and both devoted considerably more time to the ‘hoopla’ and ‘horse race’ aspects of the campaign than to the discussion of… policy or issues. In addition, both paid considerably more attention to the larger parties than to the smaller ones, and both focused heavily on the… leaders of the parties” (Gunther and Mughan 2000: 325). On the whole, the commercial channels have failed to do good journalism. In fact, mostly they have failed to do journalism at all. Only the channel RTL4 broadcasts a daily news show, the just mentioned RTL Nieuws, which is more or less well regarded. The other channels produce no serious daily news show and hardly any other programs that might be termed journalistic. Dutch public television since the 1970s has operated on a hidden commercial logic (chapter 2). With the advent of commercial television in the Netherlands in 1989, the pressure on public broadcasting to mind ratings has undoubtedly increased even more. Even public current affairs programs pay a lot of attention to ratings. When discussing who to invite, the editors of the leading political talk show Buitenhof always consider how a prospective guest did in the ratings the last time around (Luyendijk 2010: 58). In short, Dutch public broadcasting has not been able to resolve the

“core dilemma” of public broadcasters everywhere: their relationship to the wider capitalist political economy (McChesney 1999: 243). The capitalist logic has overtaken the public service mission. With a combined share of more than 80 percent, the national radio market is controlled, yet again, by three big players: the public broadcaster, the Telegraaf Media Groep (TMG) and Talpa Media (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 84). TMG is also the dominant player in the newspaper industry. In the mid-twentieth century radio was still the “quintessential family medium” but in the twenty-first century radio has devolved into the ultimate “target audience medium,” obsessed with “formats, target groups and market shares.” Reacting to the rating successes of the commercial channels, public radio has geared its programs more and more towards satisfying the market (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 88). On the other hand, public radio has also seen a small movement away from imitation of the commercial channels and towards making, or at least considering to make, programs that the commercial channels find unprofitable: educational and cultural programs and programs that highlight minority issues (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 98). The reshuffling of the FM frequencies of the commercial radio stations, which was concluded in 2003, had as its aim stimulating content diversity. It had the opposite effect. Because of the heavy debts that the stations had to assume to be able to afford a license, making as much money as quickly as possible became paramount. The stations therefore typically gear their programming towards the same, lucrative group: twenty to thirty-four year olds (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 103).

The second filter: Advertising The Dutch press depends on advertising revenue to stay afloat in the market place. The second filter therefore applies to the press and of course to the commercial broadcasters. But it also applies in part to the public broadcasting organizations. Although the majority of the funds that they operate on are public funds, they receive about a quarter of their budget from the revenue of the commercials they air. The negatives that Herman and Chomsky have identified with an advertising-supported media system therefore apply to the Dutch media. As they wrote, “With advertising, the free market does not yield a neutral system in which final buyer choice decides. The advertisers’ choices influence media prosperity and survival” (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 14; their emphasis). For instance, the socialdemocratic newspaper Het Vrije Volk was dismantled in the 1970s partly because it could not generate enough ad revenue, analogous to the fate of the Daily Herald in Britain (Rogier et al. 1985; Herman and Chomsky 1988: 15). It can come as no surprise that the Netherlands has no labor papers anymore. Advertisers prefer to avoid advertising in papers that are critical of capitalism.

The third filter: Sourcing Commercial media prefer “a steady, reliable flow of the raw material of news,” with the result that journalists spend much time at press conferences and other pseudo-news events orchestrated by official and corporate sources, which on the whole are deemed reliable (Herman and Chomsky 1988: 18). The third filter, sourcing, is also germane to the Dutch situation. Institutional sources are prominent in reporting (Vasterman and Aerden 1995). An institutional bias has been documented for the public news programs, the Journaals. Philip Van Praag Jr. (Bardoel et al. 2002) condemned the Journaal for focusing during election campaigns almost exclusively on the political parties that were assumed to end up taking part in the governing coalition. One would expect that the relatively broad political spectrum in the Netherlands leads to relatively diverse news, but Van Praag’s study indicates that this expectation might be largely unfounded. A study concluded that public broadcasting leans to the right. From September through November 2010, 47 of the top hundred guests on talk shows on public channels were from the right and only 17 from the left. A similar study in 2008 already showed that public broadcasting was “more right-wing” than was “generally assumed”; 35 of the top hundred guests came from the right and 28 from the left (Beerekamp 2010). Right-wing voices are also prominent in the magazine market. Of the four general interest magazines, the business-oriented Elsevier dominates the market with a 64 percent share. The left-leaning Vrij Nederland and De Groene Amsterdammer together hold about 30 percent of the circulation (Dutch Media Authority 2013: 74). Dutch journalism is highly professionalized, with many journalists holding advanced degrees, often in journalism. In other words, the dominant ideology among Dutch journalists, including those working in public broadcasting, is ‘objectivity.’ In interviews six editors argued that it was not the task of journalists to shape public opinion (Charles 2009: 65). From this conception of what journalism should be stem all kinds of well-documented problems, especially an overdependence on official sources, in part resulting from the need for a reliable news flow that carries a reduced risk of flak. It is an accepted notion among scholars that political reporters and politicians are caught in a symbiotic relationship; they feed off and depend on each other (Bardoel et al. 2002: 85; Luyendijk 2010). Some have argued that recently the relationship has changed from a symbiotic one to one of “mutual distrust” (Brants et al. 2010: 30). Yet distrust and symbiotic dependence are not mutually exclusive. Journalists have moonlighted for government agencies, raking in a lot of money consulting and leading seminars or discussions (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 326). By the turn of the century the ratio of pr-practitioners to journalists was about one-to-one, with the former already outnumbering the latter (Prenger and Van Vree 2003). Since, the pr-industry has grown dramatically. The exact ratio of pr-practitioners to journalists is unclear. Extrapolating from the study by Mirjam Prenger et al. (2011) it appears that an estimate of at least three pr-practitioners for every journalist is reasonable. Basing herself on the same study, Joke Hermes (2011: 12) estimated the ratio to be five-to-one. Although cross-national comparisons are tricky as a result of different definitions and research designs, it might be noted that in the US the ratio of pr-practitioners to journalists was found to be about four-to-one (McChesney and Nichols 2010). Lack of clarity about the precise numbers notwithstanding, Prenger et al. (2011: 141) concluded that in the Netherlands the pr-industry has gained much power over the last decade, that it is commonly accepted that public relations has the upper hand and that journalists are not autonomous: “Journalism is

making itself the mouthpiece of commercial and governmental interests.” A Dutch journalist who regularly reported from Afghanistan said of the relationship between war correspondents and government spokespeople that the latter have “won” (Prenger et al. 2011: 98). The government spends hundreds of millions of euros annually on public relations. The precise amount is not known but clearly “politics” has become “marketing” (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 301). Ministries brand themselves just like Coca-Cola does (Prenger et al. 2011: 20-1). A report on the future of Dutch journalism expressed concern about the large propaganda apparatus, funded by the tax payer, which the government employs to guide journalism in acceptable directions (Temporary Press Commission 2009). Video News Releases (VNRs), promotional videos made by governments, corporations or other organizations that look just like bona fide news reports, are produced more and more in the Netherlands. It is unknown how often they are used (Prenger et al. 2011: 120). As in other countries, for instance Britain (Davies 2009), Dutch journalists are constantly fighting a losing battle while sorting out the steady stream of government and corporate propaganda, with precious little time left to pursue original story ideas. The domestic desk at ANP receives more than nine hundred press releases on a typical day. An estimated couple of thousand press releases are sent every day to the Dutch media (Prenger et al. 2011: 47-8). Many journalists seem to have accepted the pr-industry as an immutable fact of their professional life. Although there still exists resentment, especially among journalists towards pr-practitioners, the groups are “antagonists no more.” They still have confrontations and differences of opinion but these are not “fundamental” (Neijens and Smith 2006). It is plausible that the pr-industry has less influence on Dutch journalism than on British or American journalism. Ellen Hijmans et al. (2011) did not find many traces of pr-material in the two main quality papers, de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad. The extent to which the Dutch media depend on pr-handouts is unclear (Prenger et al. 2011: 12-3). The pr-practice of establishing front groups, seemingly independent organizations that are secretly funded by interested parties, is rather common in the US but appears a marginal phenomenon in the Netherlands (Prenger et al. 2011: 40-1). In Manufacturing Consent Herman and Chomsky made much of the proliferation of right-wing think tanks in the US since the 1970s that aim to influence public debate. This development has not penetrated the Netherlands to a significant extent.

The fourth filter: Flak Powerful organizations and individuals are well equipped to produce flak, negative feedback, when they deem certain media content objectionable. The regular public criticisms voiced by politicians can be assumed to influence Dutch news content. Flak is also exerted in private. Half of the editorsin-chief of the national newspapers admitted that they get calls from politicians and that they on occasion heed their requests, for instance to keep information out of the paper (Prenger 2007). Journalists do not infrequently resort to self-censorship – for instance when a story idea is at odds with the dominant political or ideological climate; when sources show themselves unwilling to cooperate; when a story does not fit the medium’s format; or when politicians or advertisers turn on the pressure (Bakker and Scholten 2009: 326). PR-practitioners often resort to intimidation. They regard criticizing journalists as an integral part of their work (Prenger et al. 2011: 46). Journalists have reported attempts by advertisers to influence content by threatening to withdraw their business (Prenger et al. 2011: 111-2). As to public broadcasting, there always looms the possibility of politicians trying to cut funding, for instance because they perceive the reporting to be biased against them (Jensma and Laroes 2003). Right-wing politician Geert Wilders has pushed for severe budget cuts, possibly in part because he feels persecuted by what he derisively calls the “left-wing church,” the liberal establishment including the public broadcasting organizations.

The fifth filter: Pro-market ideology As to the fifth filter, ideology, there is no doubt that the Dutch media are constrained by the prevailing pro-market climate in the Netherlands. During the Cold War the media exhibited a pro-American, anticommunist attitude. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall the dominant political ideology in the Netherlands has moved more and more towards belief in the market as the solution to all or at least most problems (Chavannes 2009). The most dramatic illustration of this trend is the rise to prominence of Wilders’ PVV. Another example is the move to the center (which in turn has shifted to the right) by the traditionally large social-democratic party PvdA, analogous to Labour’s move to the center in Britain in the 1990s. Journalists thus function within an increasingly neoliberal environment. Commercial media organizations criticize the government’s media policy, because public funding for broadcasting is perceived as unfair competition. Frequently at issue is whether the public broadcasting organizations should be allowed to maintain news websites. Some commentators even question whether the Netherlands still needs public broadcasting. They argue that the commercial broadcasters have shown to be capable of providing journalism of high quality (Zwagerman 2010 and 2013). Public debates about the media often assume a left-wing instead of a right-wing, pro-corporate news bias. News shows constitute a prominent but small part of public programming. Many other programs are meant to be ‘just’ entertainment, yet they often promote dubious values, like a consumerist lifestyle. Or they stimulate nationalism, for instance by broadcasting games of the national football team or fawning over the royal family.

Research supporting a Dutch propaganda model Much research indicates that the propaganda model is a viable model for explaining the Dutch news media, especially regarding foreign coverage (De Landtsheer et al. 2002; Vliegenthart and Schröder 2010; Walgrave and Verhulst 2005; Wieten 2002). A study found NRC Handelsblad’s coverage of the first and second Intifadas, the Palestinian uprisings against illegal Israeli rule of Gaza and the West Bank, to be biased in favor of the Israeli version of events. The researchers speculated that the bias originated in the steadfast support by the Dutch government for Israel. This appears a plausible explanation because objective journalism depends on powerful, official sources for ascribing meaning to events. Journalists regard it as unprofessional to persist in contravening official sources. The frame that these sources advance will typically be the dominant one in the media too. A clue as to the value of this explanation is that NRC Handelsblad was found to be less biased towards the Israeli point of view during the second Intifada, perhaps a reflection of the changing political climate in the Netherlands, which is still predominantly pro-Israel but has become more sympathetic to the Palestinian version of events (Deprez et al. 2011: 39-41). The same conclusion, that the Dutch media are biased in favor of Israel, was reached by Jacqueline De Bruijn, who in 2002 studied news programs on the public and commercial broadcasters. She found that Palestinians typically commit “bloody” or “terrorist” attacks, whereas they themselves “lose their life” as a result of Israeli “actions” or “incidents.” Radical journalist Stan Van Houcke revealed that Dutch correspondents are guilty of self-censorship in favor of the Israeli cause because they support it or have personal ties to Israelis or both (Hamelink 2004: 45-6.) Only one study has replicated research by Herman or Chomsky for the Dutch media. Lex Rietman, who subsequently became a correspondent in Spain, wrote his MA-thesis (1988) on the reporting in Western-European newspapers, including three Dutch papers, of elections in El Salvador and Nicaragua in 1984. Herman had found that The New York Times parroted the American government’s line by praising the elections in El Salvador as fair and denouncing those in Sandinistaled Nicaragua, while human rights organizations and independent foreign election observers, surely more reliable sources than Washington, reached the opposite conclusion. Rietman concluded that NRC Handelsblad and De Telegraaf exhibited the same flaws as the leading American newspaper. De Volkskrant did a lot better but its reporting also was significantly flawed. According to Rietman, a possible reason that de Volkskrant performed relatively well was the expertise of its then correspondent for Latin-America, Jan Van der Putten. Overall, Rietman’s study supported the contention that the predictions of what Herman and Chomsky would come to call the propaganda model also hold for the Dutch coverage. Of the fifteen Western-European newspapers studied, only The Guardian came close to giving a fair representation of the actual situation in both countries. The coverage in the French newspaper LeMonde was found to be especially bad (Bergman 2003; Rietman 1988). Other research shows that the coverage of domestic affairs leaves much to be desired. The situation in the local press is beyond dire. Competition has all but disappeared (Dutch Media Authority 2013). It is common practice that pr-practitioners get to see articles before publication, ostensibly to check for factual errors. But often some sort of negotiation ensues which does not restrict itself to questions of fact. Journalists accept many suggestions for ‘improvements,’ including changes in quotes (Prenger et al. 2011: 117-8). A study on the reporting of the 2010 local elections

concluded that the press almost completely neglected to delve into the issues. The neglect was so profound that the researchers could not find enough articles for a content analysis. The local papers mostly followed the news agenda as set by politicians by publishing (often short) stories based on their proclamations. The researchers (Hietbrink et al. 2010: 48-9) noted that the papers seemed thoroughly uninterested in the concerns of citizens: Regional journalism pretends to be the ear and eye of the region. This election study makes probable that the media certainly do not reside in the capillaries of local democracy and that local democracy is hardly supported by local media. Here lies a big challenge for journalism. A very big one.

The subsequent recommendations by the researchers, although well-intentioned, can only be regarded as inadequate. They amount to exhortations to do better journalism. Do not let politicians dominate the news agenda, use more and more diverse sources, and so on (Hietbrink et al. 2010: 50). Yet many journalists already know what they should be doing. The power structure of which they are a part prevents them from acting on their better judgment.

The propaganda model ignored The second order prediction of the propaganda model is that the model itself will be ignored in scholarship and the public debate, because it repudiates the not-for-discussion assumption that journalism is performing at least adequately as a check on power. This prediction holds for the Netherlands. A Lexis-Nexis search for ‘propaganda model’ from January 1, 1988, until January 1, 2012, yields not a single result for the quality newspapers de Volkskrant, NRC Handelsblad, Trouw or the popular De Telegraaf. In the same period, Trouw mentioned ‘manufacturing consent’ in one article (Tan 1993). De Volkskrant (2006) also mentioned the term in one article, in a short news report on the court case spawned by the Turkish translation of the book.7 NRC Handelsblad mentioned the term in four articles. During that same period, Noam Chomsky was mentioned in 121 articles in NRC Handelsblad; in 51 articles in Trouw; and in 92 articles in de Volkskrant. De Telegraaf (2005) mentioned him in one article, describing him as “controversial” and “ultra leftwing,” and warning that he is “known to be a friend of Holocaust deniers,” a baseless claim. Edward Herman, perhaps the main architect of the propaganda model, was not mentioned in De Telegraaf, NRC Handelsblad or de Volkskrant. Trouw referred to him once, in passing and dismissively (Crijnen 2002). Manufacturing Consent was not translated into Dutch. Dutch scholarship resembles its American counterpart in many respects (Zwier et al. 2006) but in American media studies Manufacturing Consent has entered the canon (McChesney and Scott 2004). Not so in the Netherlands. In the Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap, the flagship of Dutch communication scholarship, the model is mentioned in two articles from 2005 until 2012. It is mentioned in three articles in the Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis in the same period and in four articles in the journal Sociologie from 2002 to 2012. The term ‘manufacturing consent’ does not occur in those three journals (boomlemmatijdschriften.nl).

Conclusion These examinations of the Dutch media landscape and existing research indicate that the propaganda model applies to the Netherlands too. This conclusion is significant because it highlights the similarities between the news systems in the US and the Netherlands. From such a vantage point, it becomes clear that the persistent pro-elite bias in news content and the current crises in journalism in the Netherlands and the US share at least one main cause, namely the commercial underpinnings of the news industry. In the author’s opinion, both critical and mainstream scholars exaggerate the differences between the American and Continental European media systems. They tend to assume that the differences in news content are substantial also. For instance, Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s Comparing Media Systems (2004) classifies countries into three different systems. The implication is that news content must be substantially different too. Scholars who actively look for differences between countries and their media systems will surely find them. Yet such analyses rarely include a comparative look at the news content produced by different systems. This chapter does not fully answer the question to what extent the model applies to the Netherlands. The model probably does not explain the Dutch news media to the same extent as it explains their American counterparts, for instance because public broadcasting is much stronger in the Netherlands than in the US. In the end only replications for the Netherlands of studies done in Manufacturing Consent and elsewhere by Herman and Chomsky can provide a definitive answer. Chapters 2, 5, 6 and 7 show however that the news on foreign affairs in the Dutch media suffers from a pronounced and stubborn pro-elite bias similar to, if not the same as, the persistent class bias produced by the American news system.

5. Following Washington’s Lead: The Press on Looming War in Iraq In part because of the much-discussed crisis in Western journalism, the subfield of political economy of the news media has recently gained, if not adherents, then at least analytical relevance (McChesney 2007). For the commercialization of the news media is frequently regarded as a key factor in that crisis (McChesney and Nichols 2010; McChesney and Pickard 2011). This chapter examines how three leading Dutch newspapers reported on the run-up to the war in Iraq and thereby contributes to the literature on foreign affairs reporting that supports a political-economic perspective (Bennett 1990; Bennett et al. 2007; Glasgow University Media Group 1985; Hallin 1989; Herman and Chomsky 1988, 2002; Herring and Robinson 2003; Philo and Berry 2004, 2011). A politicaleconomic analysis emphasizes that the news industry constitutes an integral part of the economic and political establishment and that therefore news content, perhaps especially foreign and economic news, often uncritically reflects elite perspectives, for instance by privileging the self-serving narratives spun by national, elite sources. In the US and Britain, the influence of this critical perspective in the field of communication studies has been substantial as opposed to in the Netherlands (chapter 3). This in part explains why, despite a priori plausibility (i.e. a largely market-driven media system, a professional, objective journalism and a burgeoning pr-industry) the existence of a persistent pro-elite bias in Dutch foreign news is hardly ever noted in the scholarship, although extant studies do reveal this bias (De Landtsheer et al. 2002; Hamelink 2004; Rietman 1988; Vliegenthart and Schröder 2010; chapter 4). The aim of this chapter is to provide additional empirical evidence that this bias is clearly present in the Dutch media. The central empirical question that this chapter addresses is whether the Dutch press served the needs of the public for independent, critical evaluations of the claims made by the governments that in 2003 geared up for war with Iraq. Or did the press primarily serve the aims of those who supported war, aims which by and large coincided with the interests of Dutch political and economic elites (Davids 2010)? This chapter examines three aspects of the coverage. The first concerns weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Saddam’s alleged possession of such weapons was the main pro-war argument put forward by the US and Britain, but in hindsight we know that Saddam did not possess them. More importantly, in the run-up to the war there was no concrete evidence that he did. Many sources that could be deemed more credible than the US government (e.g. UN weapons inspectors) argued that the chances of Iraq having such weapons and posing a threat to the Middle East or the West were minimal at best and that no concrete evidence existed that it did. Which position did the Dutch press highlight? Second, the extent to which views opposing the claims of the main belligerents were present in the Dutch press is examined. By looking at the articles mentioning ‘Iraq’ and ‘oil’ it is examined how often the Dutch press ascribed to the US the opportunistic intention of aiming to control Iraq’s vast oil reserves. Also examined is how the press reported on Royal Dutch Shell. Did the press highlight that the Dutch government’s pro-war stance could be informed by the aim of promoting the corporation’s

huge potential economic interests in Iraq? Now it is known that already before the invasion the DutchBritish owned Shell negotiated with London about its future in post-Saddam Iraq (Bignell 2011), but reports that the big oil companies were talking to the belligerent governments, Iraqi officials and the Iraqi opposition were already circulating before the invasion (Alberts and De Graaf 2003; Shah 2003). Shell ultimately signed a contract worth billions of dollars for exploiting gas reserves in Iraq (de Volkskrant 2011a). Third, the press reception of Colin Powell’s speech to the Security Council, the pivotal attempt by the US administration to make its case, is studied. The speech was riddled with misleading statements, we now know. But at the time there already existed evidence that this was the case and evidence of the American government’s frequent mendacity concerning Iraq (Artz and Kamalipour 2005: ix-x; Milbank 2002; Rangwala 2003). Powell provided hardly any, if any at all, verifiable evidence that Saddam had WMDs. How much credibility did the Dutch press attach to Powell’s speech?

Historical background and literature review The US and the Netherlands have been close allies since WWII (Davids 2010). Employing a political-economic approach, it might therefore be expected that the Dutch news during the Cold War and beyond has exhibited a persistent pro-American bias (chapter 2) and that this bias also colored the reporting and commentary on the war in Iraq, which on the whole was supported by the Dutch government. The contention that in foreign policy matters Western news privileges official narratives has been firmly established (Bennett et al. 2007; Herman and Chomsky 1988, 2002; Herring and Robinson 2003; Robinson et al. 2010). The American media failed in their coverage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the war and the occupation (Boyd-Barrett 2004; Domke 2004; McChesney 2007: 253-4, note 145; Moeller 2004). The Washington Post and The New York Times apologized for the uncritical nature of their coverage, although these apologies are perhaps more aptly called apologias (Marks 2008). In other Western countries, for instance Britain, major flaws in the coverage have also been detected (Edwards and Cromwell 2006; Lewis et al. 2006). Yet it has also been argued that perhaps the media performed better than was to be expected on the basis of so-called hegemonic models of media performance including the propaganda model (Robertson 2004; Robinson et al. 2010). Important to bear in mind is that the Iraq war was an exceptional case. Rarely if ever were war plans challenged by so many ordinary people, experts, international organizations and governments. The drive for war was led by only two countries, the US and Britain. Certainly in Britain the looming war faced considerable domestic opposition, including from highly-placed sources like Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. There was also considerable elite disagreement in the Netherlands, where two (albeit small) left-wing political parties opposed the looming war. The large social-democratic PvdA too did not support the war, at least until the day of the invasion. In short, journalists had at their disposal ample information, put forward by credible sources, which undermined the elite narratives emanating from London and Washington. Therefore the run-up to the invasion of Iraq might be expected to present a (partial) exception to claims that the media are submissive to elite interests (Robinson et al. 2010: 61; Bennett 1990). The Dutch involvement in the war in Iraq was extensively studied by the government-sanctioned but independent Commission Davids. The picture that arises from its report (Davids 2010; also Oranje 2004) is one of a government manipulating and selectively informing parliament and the public, ignoring experts (e.g. law professors) and its own intelligence services, and providing not just political but also material support for an illegal military action, which lacked a UNmandate. Against the wish of the majority of the Dutch, their government followed the US and Britain not blindly and naively, but deliberately and not without resolve. A longstanding foreign policy tradition and perceived political interests (which in practice are inextricably intertwined with economic interests) dictated this course, which was basically already set in stone in the fall of 2002. According to the Commission Davids, a desire not to rupture the longstanding alliance with the US was the most important reason for Dutch support of Washington. Also a part played an affinity with “American idealism” and residual gratitude for the liberation in WWII (Davids 2010: 210). The government was prepared to provide military support to the invasion, but claimed to refrain from doing so because of the domestic opposition to the war (Davids 2010; but see Jaspers 2005). A few months after the fall of Baghdad, the Netherlands sent 1,200 military personnel to the province Al Muthanna. The contingent stayed until early 2005, suffering two deadly casualties and killing a number of Iraqis

(Jaspers 2005). The tenor of the debates in the Netherlands about the coverage of the war in Iraq, at least among journalists and experts, appears to have been that although mistakes were made, not enough reason to apologize existed, and no news outlet did (Beunders 2004; Reijnders 2007; Wesselius 2007). Yet some have been highly critical of the media’s performance. Historian Maarten Van Rossem said that Powell’s speech was so weak that an average high school student could easily dismantle it, but that the media nonetheless swallowed it, hook, line and sinker (Wesselius 2007). Cees Hamelink (2004) and Jaap Van Ginneken (Ummelen 2009) claim that the Dutch media covered the run-up to the war uncritically, but have provided no systematic data to back up the assertion.8 Research on the Dutch media’s coverage of the war in Iraq is scant, but supports a critical assessment. To the author’s knowledge, only two studies address the issue, aside from a number of MA-theses (e.g. Gould 2007). The first one, a computer-assisted analysis covering the period September 2002 to August 2003, concluded that of the newspapers in the four countries examined (US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands) the Dutch papers were the most positive about the war. The study also concluded that “protest coverage [was] the least present in the country with relatively weak protest (the Netherlands); in all other countries the protest frame occur[red] in between 10 and 13 percent additional articles” (Vliegenthart and Schröder 2010: 76-7). The researchers explained the “comparatively low and favorable coverage” of the war in the Dutch press by pointing to the election campaign that was going on in the Netherlands, in which Iraq was not a major issue. The researchers also noted that “the Dutch government played a much less central role in both the event itself and the international debate surrounding it” than the American, British and German governments. They concluded (2010: 78) that “The combination of those two factors is likely to have caused the Iraq issue to be less salient and less controversial in the Dutch media as compared to the other three countries.” The second study also concerned a cross-national comparison. It examined American, Dutch, British, Spanish, Italian, Belgian and German newspapers from January 1 to March 20, 2003, and found that de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad carried more anti-war articles and De Telegraaf more pro-war articles. The Dutch press tended to oppose the war, according to this study, but the number of pro- and anti-war arguments balanced each other out (Walgrave and Verhulst 2005: 11-2). The study also found that “only in the Netherlands [did] all newspapers seem to neglect opposition against the war.” The Dutch papers “tended to consider war as inevitable and went along with the war logic” (Walgrave and Verhulst 2005: 13-4). Although Dutch public opinion was predominantly against the war, as was the case almost all over the world, the Dutch press reported almost equally about positive and negative public opinion. In contrast, the American and British papers at least made clear that public opinion was predominantly opposed to the war (Walgrave and Verhulst 2005: 15).

Methodology A political-economic approach posits that the commercial structure of the news media results in biased news content that privileges elite perspectives. A central task for such an approach constitutes providing evidence that the expectations arising from a macro-level analysis of the media industry can indeed be shown on the micro-level, i.e. in the content. Perhaps most famously, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988, 2002) selected “paired examples,” that is, events like elections or atrocities of about the same scope and occurring at the same time, with the main distinction being that some were organized or committed by official enemies of Washington and others by allies, often with support from Washington. Herman and Chomsky showed that the American media ignored or downplayed atrocities for which Washington or its allies were responsible and played up those committed by official enemies. Other studies of foreign news that support a political-economic perspective examined for instance sourcing practices and also showed that foreign news privileges elite perspectives and that the reporting typically remains within the bounds set by elite discussions at the expense of other perspectives (Bennett 1990; Bennett et al. 2007; Hallin 1989). The run-up to the war in Iraq lacks an obvious paired example. Therefore, the coverage is studied using a varied approach that mixes quantitative and qualitative methods. This approach was chosen because a mix of methods can ensure greater reliability of results and also because the two existing studies on the Dutch coverage of the war in Iraq were completely quantitative in nature. Although cherry-picking is always a danger of a qualitative approach, a purely quantitative approach has the drawback that numbers are abstract; a representative quote can reveal something about the coverage that a number cannot. Also, the existing studies do not explicitly address two issues that are central for a thorough evaluation of the coverage, namely the alleged WMDs and Powell’s justification of war before the Security Council. Finally, the existing studies are cross-national comparative analyses and therefore primarily reveal something about how the Dutch coverage differed from that in other countries. In contrast, this chapter embeds the coverage in the politicaleconomic perspective and thus employs an explicit moral framework (Mosco 1996). It measures the coverage by the normative standard that media should facilitate and not thwart democratic discussions based on a more or less accurate picture of reality. The following content analyses concern three national Dutch newspapers: De Telegraaf, NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant. The latter two are regarded as the best newspapers in the Netherlands. They perform an agenda-setting function for the rest of the media, print and broadcasting, public and private. Their reputation is equivalent to that of The New York Times and The Washington Post in the US, with USA Today being the closest American equivalent to De Telegraaf, which has a reputation of being populist-conservative. Politically, NRC Handelsblad is considered a centrist or right-of-center newspaper. De Volkskrant is a paper with left-of-center views. One might assume that the coverage by de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad constituted not just the best print journalism in the Netherlands, but the best journalism overall, as print journalism is known to be more in-depth and capable of displaying more complexity than broadcast journalism. In the first quarter of 2003, De Telegraaf was by far the most widely-read paper in the Netherlands. De Volkskrant was the second biggest national paper and NRC Handelsblad the fourth biggest. Together they controlled more than half of the total circulation of national newspapers (hoi-online.nl).

Study I: Does Iraq have WMDs? The central question in the run-up to the war in Iraq was whether the country possessed WMDs which posed a threat to other countries, as asserted by the US and Britain. Their central justification for going to war was that Saddam was likely to use such weapons or to put them at the disposal of AlQaida, with another terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11 or beyond as a consequence. The most important feature then of the coverage concerns the question of how critically the press reported on Saddam’s alleged possession of such weapons. From the database Lexis-Nexis all the texts in the three papers which mentioned the word WMDs (‘massavernietigingswapens’) were retrieved for the period January 1 to March 20, 2003, the day of the invasion. One ‘mention’ was operationalized as consisting of the paragraph in which the word occurred, the paragraph directly above (if applicable) and the one directly underneath (if applicable). When the word ‘WMDs’ occurred more than once in a paragraph, it was counted as one mention. When the word occurred in two subsequent paragraphs, the one mention consisted of two, three or four paragraphs. When in an article a source was cited that stated that Iraq had WMDs and this statement was not contradicted by the journalist or another source, then this was counted as an affirmative mention, and vice versa. The mentions were coded into four categories. The first three of those categories are: (1) it is stated or clearly assumed that the WMDs are (likely) present in Iraq; (2) it is stated or clearly assumed that the WMDs are (likely) not in Iraq; and (3) it is stated that there is insufficient evidence of their presence (now or in the near future). Category 4 consists of mentions which, for instance by presenting two opposing sources, left open the possibility that the weapons were in Iraq and the possibility that they were not; of mentions which did not make a clear claim as to whether the WMDs were present or not; and of mentions which did not pertain to WMDs in Iraq, but for instance referred to North Korea’s WMDs. Whenever ‘alleged’ or a similar term was employed, the mention was coded in category 4. For each of the three papers, a different native Dutch speaker recoded the results. The acquired intercoder-reliability measure through the Holsti-formula is 0.93 for both De Telegraaf and NRC Handelsblad and 0.92 for de Volkskrant. Values above 0.90 are considered reliable (Wimmer and Dominick 2006: 169).

Results The pro-American bias in the reporting is clearly shown by the fact that the passages which asserted or clearly assumed that Iraq (likely) had WMDs are high in absolute numbers: around 40 percent for NRC Handelsblad and De Telegraaf and over 30 percent for de Volkskrant (Table 1). The most remarkable finding might be the low percentage of passages (around 10 percent for NRC Handelsblad and De Telegraaf, less than 20 percent for de Volkskrant) that either denied that Iraq had WMDs or asserted that insufficient evidence existed that it did. In other words, the likely possibility that Iraq had no WMDs was marginal to the coverage. De Telegraaf was almost four times more likely to support the notion that Iraq had WMDs than to cast severe doubt on or deny their existence. NRC Handelsblad was more than five times more likely to write as if Iraq had WMDs than to assert that it did not or that the evidence was insufficient. For de Volkskrant, the results are somewhat better, but also in that left-leaning paper the coverage was biased in favor of US interests. Overall, the Dutch press was three times more likely to support the presence of WMDs in Iraq than to

doubt their existence. Moreover, denials that Iraq had WMDs not infrequently came from Saddam himself or his officials. Almost all readers would have justifiably regarded these sources as unreliable. A limitation of this study is the broad category of Balanced, Neutral and Irrelevant mentions. The high number of articles that fall in this category is partly the result of the adopted definition of a mention: one mention frequently constituted quite a long passage. It would be incorrect however to point to this category and argue that the Dutch press in fact did perform reasonably well. Many of the mentions in that category simply did not assert that Iraq had WMDs or that it did not and many other mentions did not pertain to Iraq. Table 1: Articles mentioning WMDs before the Iraq war. WMDs present WMDs absent/Lack of evidence Balanced/Neutral/ Irrelevant NRC Handelsblad 43%

8%

49%

de Volkskrant

32%

17%

51%

De Telegraaf

39%

11%

50%

Totals

37%

12%

51%

Study II: Reporting dissent The treatment in the Dutch press of those who dissented from the official line emanating from Washington and London is examined in a number of ways. First, how often did the Dutch press mention or advance the accusation that US policy was (mainly or in part) driven by the aim of controlling Iraqi oil? From Lexis-Nexis were retrieved all the articles of more than a hundred words in the three newspapers in the period January 1 to March 20, 2003, which mentioned ‘Iraq’ and ‘war’ (‘oorlog’) and ‘US,’ ‘United States’ or ‘America.’ For NRC Handelsblad the number of retrieved articles was 525, for de Volkskrant 406 and for De Telegraaf 209 (Table 2). Then ‘oil’ was added to the search criteria. For NRC Handelsblad this yielded 90 articles (17 percent), for de Volkskrant 66 (16 percent) and for De Telegraaf 28 (13 percent). Of the 90 articles in NRC Handelsblad, 42 affirmed or dismissed at least once the claim that the US was in it for the oil. This means that only 8 percent of the total number of articles in NRC Handelsblad mentioned the claim that oil was a motivator of US policy. For de Volkskrant these numbers are 31 out of a total of 406 (8 percent) and for De Telegraaf seven out of 209 (3 percent). The average for the three newspapers combined is 7 percent (80 of 1,140 articles). Table 2: Iraq-articles mentioning ‘war’ and ‘oil.’ ‘War’ ‘War’ and ‘oil’ ‘War’ and ‘oil’ linked ‘Oil’ in headline, lead or both de Volkskrant

406

66 (16%)

31 (8%)

8 (2%)

De Telegraaf

209

28 (13%)

7 (3%)

1 (0.5%)

NRC Handelsblad 525

90 (17%)

42 (8%)

6 (1%)

80 (7%)

15 (1%)

Totals

1,140 184 (16%)

These percentages present an exaggerated impression of the emphasis that the Dutch press put on US oil interests as a salient explanation for the Iraq crisis. Of the 80 articles in the three papers which mentioned (affirmatively or dismissively) oil as an explanation for US policy, only fifteen (one in De Telegraaf, eight in de Volkskrant and six in NRC Handelsblad) did so either in the lead or the headline or both. On the total of 1,140 articles, this amounts to a little over 1 percent. Moreover, some of these fifteen mentions constituted (partial) denials that oil was one of Washington’s motivations. On some occasions, claims that oil was the real or underlying US motivator were made by sources which can be seen as having low credibility, for instance Saddam, other Iraqi officials or regular Arabs. The mentions in the 80 articles not infrequently constituted blanket or partial denials that oil played a role. Frans Verhagen (2003), an in the Netherlands well-known expert on the US, for instance argued that “the war in Iraq, then, is not about oil but about an ideal that will appeal to the Dutch especially: a better world.” A foreign desk editor of NRC Handelsblad, Carolien Roelants (2003), opened a news article with the sentence: “The US is going to bring democracy and freedom to Iraq, but first a military occupation.” Later in the article she let US officials deny that the invasion was all about oil. NRC-

editor Sjoerd De Jong (2003) denounced the “pseudo-worldly wisdom” that the war was about oil as a “vulgar-Marxist explanation,” which to many people might be “soothing” but in fact is lame. One wonders how De Jong would evaluate the blunt assessment by well-known Marxist Alan Greenspan. The former head of the US Federal Reserve stated in his memoirs (Robinson et al. 2010: 38): Whatever their publicized angst over Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, American and British authorities were also concerned about violence in the area that harbours a resource indispensable for the functioning of the world economy. I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.

The contention that the US (in part) wanted go to war with Iraq for (the control over) oil was supported not just by common sense and old and recent official documents (Chomsky 2009b), but also by official sources like the British Secretary of State Jack Straw and PvdA-spokesman Bert Koenders (Alberts and De Graaf 2003). Yet only seven articles in De Telegraaf mentioned oil as an explanation for US policy. A letter writer, Saddam Hussein, London mayor Ken Livingston and an unnamed member of the Kurdish political party in Turkey claimed that oil did matter to the Americans. The editor-in-chief of De Telegraaf, Kees Lunshof, addressed the issue twice. In a column whose headline characterized demonstrators against the upcoming war as “naive,” he asked rhetorically what would actually be wrong with toppling Saddam so as to stop him from controlling Iraq’s oil (Lunshof 2003a). In another column Lunshof (2003b) made the same point. Dick Leurdijk, an expert with the prestigious Clingendael Instituut, comparable to the American Brookings Institute, claimed in an article headlined “Europe underestimates problem of terror” that Iraq’s oil riches were “at the most an extra reason” for the US to attack. The Dutch press, then, marginalized the position that the US wanted to go to war because of Iraq’s oil. It was seen as a dubious assertion at best – the stuff of op-eds. This finding affirms Walgrave and Verhulst’s (2005) conclusion that the Dutch papers neglected opposition to the war. An additional indication of the marginalization of dissident perspectives is the treatment of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a well-known and knowledgeable activist against the war (Rivers Pitt with Ritter 2002; Ritter 2003). Non-treatment would be a more apt phrase. From January 1 to March 20, 2003, Ritter was mentioned only twice, once in de Volkskrant and once in NRC Handelsblad, both times in passing. The mentions did not concern Ritter’s criticism of Washington’s drive for war (Ghattas 2003; Knip 2003b).

Shell’s role According to insiders, Shell, one of the biggest multinationals in the world, exerts a strong influence on Dutch foreign policy (Staps 2011). Illustrative of the strong ties between the corporation and the government is the revolving door between them (Van den Dool 2012). The truism that in the formulation of foreign policy economic factors are part of the equation (Chomsky 2009a) was articulated by former Dutch Secretary of State, Josias Van Aartsen, only weeks before the invasion. He said that during a visit to Washington in 2002 he already discussed what an Iraq after Saddam would look like: “Of course you also do that because you know that Dutch economic interests are at play… I would have been a lousy Secretary of State if I had not taken those economic interests with me in the back of my mind” (NRC Handelsblad 2003a). Before the invasion, the Netherlands imported Iraqi oil to the tune of almost 300 million dollars a year. The country was more dependent on Iraqi oil than the US (Klok 2003).

Shell stood to profit enormously from regaining entry into Iraq. Therefore it cannot come as a surprise that at the end of 2002 Shell and British Petroleum (BP) consulted with the British government. Internal government documents cite a high official in the Foreign Office as saying that “Shell and BP could not afford not to have a stake in [Iraq] for the sake of their long-term future... We were determined to get a fair slice of the action for UK companies in a post-Saddam Iraq” (Bignell 2011). Reports that the big oil companies were lobbying the parties in the Iraq dispute already circulated before the invasion took place (Alberts and De Graaf 2003; Shah 2003). Shell certainly ended up profiting from the invasion. It signed a contract with the Iraqi government worth billions of dollars (de Volkskrant 2011a). Did the Dutch press connect Shell’s interests to the looming war in Iraq? How often did the press connect Shell’s interests to the pro-American position that the Dutch government took? A LexisNexis search for ‘Iraq’ was performed for the three papers for the period January 1 to March 20, 2003. Subsequently all the articles were retrieved which also mentioned ‘Shell.’ For De Telegraaf these numbers were 531 and six respectively; for NRC Handelsblad 1,122 and 20; for de Volkskrant 944 and 8 (Table 3). This means that 1.3 percent of the articles (34 out of 2,597) that mentioned Iraq also mentioned Shell. Of those 34 articles, only ten explicitly linked Shell’s interests to the coming war. Seven of the ten articles appeared in NRC Handelsblad, two in de Volkskrant and one in De Telegraaf. The mention in the last paper constituted a brief (and false as we now know) denial by Shell-executive Jeroen Van der Veer that the “war loot” was “already being divided” (Van Beuningen 2003). Only one of the ten articles that explicitly linked Shell’s interests to a war in Iraq also linked the Dutch government’s support for the war to the interests of Shell (Klok 2003). In short, a critical examination of the economic interests of Shell in toppling Saddam, and their likely influence (direct or indirect) on the Dutch government’s pro-war stance, was (virtually) absent from the coverage. Table 3: Articles mentioning ‘Iraq’ and ‘Shell.’ ‘Iraq’ ‘Iraq’ and ‘Shell’ War linked to Shell’s interests De Telegraaf

531

6 (1.1%)

1 (0.2%)

de Volkskrant

944

8 (0.85%)

2 (0.2%)

NRC Handelsblad 1,122 20 (1.8%)

7 (0.6%)

Totals

10 (0.4%)

2,597 34 (1.3%)

Editorials provide further indication that the Dutch press did not highlight dissident views on the war, to say the least. All the editorials in the three newspapers from February 15 to March 20, 2003, that included the word ‘Iraq’ were retrieved from Lexis-Nexis. None of them mentioned oil in connection to the looming war. The words ‘imperialism’ and ‘Shell’ were also absent. Criticism of the Powellspeech was virtually absent. Two editorials briefly mentioned that the head of the UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blix, had criticized Powell’s speech, with de Volkskrant writing that he had “even” done so (de Volkskrant 2003c; NRC Handelsblad 2003d).

Study III: The reception of Powell’s speech In a speech before the Security Council on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out the American case for going to war with Iraq. He claimed that the US knew for a fact that Iraq had WMDs, but he hardly presented evidence that could be verified. He often did not disclose the identity of his purported sources and said that he possessed more evidence than he showed: “I cannot tell you everything that we know.” But he emphatically stated that his claims were factual: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” According to Powell, not only had Iraq not disarmed, it was also trying to make more WMDs, including nuclear weapons. Iraq’s weapons programs posed “real and present dangers” to the whole world, if only because Iraq had ties to alQaida. Iraq was thwarting the UN inspectors and had not proven that it had destroyed all forbidden weapons, in breach of UN Resolution 1441. Iraq was behaving suspiciously, as if it were hiding something, the argument went. Powell claimed that “leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world” (Powell 2003). Powell’s presentation amounted to a partisan source making largely unsupported statements, often on the basis of unknown sources – statements which flatly contradicted what independent experts like the UN weapons inspectors were saying, namely that there was no evidence of Iraqi WMDs. The burden of proof for justifying war must be very high. In no way did Powell’s assertions meet this burden, for he hardly provided anything that could be labeled ‘concrete evidence.’ This was so obvious that before his speech Powell already made known that he would not present a smoking gun. The verbal maneuver amounted to a neat public relations trick, aimed at taking at least some of the wind out of the sails of the pundits. The American mainstream media discredited the Powell-speech only when it was too late (Hanley 2003). Yet very soon it was clear that the Powell-speech was unreliable (Davids 2010: 203). Indeed, the evidence to challenge Powell’s claims was available right away. For instance, Glen Rangwala (2003), a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, almost immediately posted an elaborate rebuttal of the speech on the internet. He also revealed that a British government report purporting to prove that Iraq possessed WMDs was largely plagiarized from a graduate student paper, which was nonetheless characterized by Powell in his speech as a “fine paper” that “describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.” The large political party PvdA reacted skeptically to Powell’s speech. It spoke of “fragmented” and partly “old” evidence and argued that in the end it was up to the UN to determine whether Iraq had violated any resolutions (De Telegraaf 2003). British experts immediately criticized the speech for lack of evidence. Permanent Security Council members France, Russia and China were not too impressed either. They stuck to their position that the UN should take the lead in dismantling Iraq’s alleged WMDs (Nijdam 2003). Blix criticized the speech in mid-February in a report to the Security Council. The news media thus had plenty of skeptical and credible sources at their disposal. Moreover, already before the speech there was good reason to believe that Iraq had no WMDs (Rivers Pitt with Ritter 2002; Solomon and Erlich 2003) and that the US government had frequently lied about Iraq (Artz and Kamalipour 2005: ix-x; Milbank 2002). How did the Dutch press receive the speech?

For the three newspapers, all the articles containing the word ‘Powell’ from the day of his speech until a week after were retrieved from Lexis-Nexis. Then the articles were selected that made clear evaluative judgments about the speech. News articles were excluded, even when they sometimes made what could be seen as evaluative statements (e.g. de Volkskrant 2003b). For De Telegraaf this left three articles, for NRC Handelsblad eight and for de Volkskrant four. Table 4: Articles evaluating Powell’s speech. Supportive

Critical

De Telegraaf

3

0

de Volkskrant

4

0

NRC Handelsblad

6

2

Totals

13

2

De Telegraaf on Powell The Dutch press evaluated Powell’s speech favorably (Table 4). De Telegraaf addressed the speech in two editorials. Both were strident in their support for the American Secretary of State. The first one, published the day after the speech, unequivocally took the position that Powell had more than proven his case. Under the headline “Convincing,” the first sentence stated that Powell had “convincingly shown that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein up to the present day has completely disregarded the demand of the world community to disarm.” Powell “presented enough credible cluesthat show that Iraq does indeed possess [WMDs] and components of those weapons and moreover the means to deploy those weapons over long distances.” Clearly there was only one viable option left: to let the Americans take the lead in disarming Iraq (Lunshof 2003c). The second editorial attacked the political parties on the left for their “naive” and “inept” reactions to Powell’s speech. The Socialist Party (SP) was singled out for its “anti-Americanism.” The SP’s crime was that it did not believe anything Powell had said. The SP was conveniently ignoring that “the US cannot afford to tell nonsense.” The editorial lamented that the SP and the other left-wing parties failed to comprehend how much of a threat Saddam posed (Lunshof 2003d). A column in De Telegraaf crudely made fun of France and Germany’s opposition to the American plans for war. In a fictional phone conversation between Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, the French leader said that, frankly, Powell’s speech was completely convincing: “People who still don’t believe that Saddam has nothing to hide are insane.” The German Chancellor answered that were the inspectors to find weapons in Iraq, then France and Germany still had one option left. They could insist that they wanted to have verified that Saddam’s fingerprints were on the weapons before they would be forced to concede that they had been wrong (Hoogland 2003).

De Volkskrant on Powell

De Volkskrant discussed Powell’s speech in an editorial the day after. The American Secretary of State had not provided “incontrovertible evidence” that Iraq possessed WMDs, according to the paper, but the “presented evidence” was nonetheless “incriminating.” The possibility that the audio tapes and images in Powell’s presentation had been manipulated was dismissed by de Volkskrant, because in an “open, democratic society like the US” such deceit would be too likely to get discovered. Certainly Powell had proven that the Iraqis were successfully misleading the weapons inspectors. The editorial seemed to assume that Iraq possessed WMDs, for it concluded that the Security Council needed to find a way “to force the stubborn Saddam to disarm while preventing war.” Yet the paper also argued that there was no “clear casus belli” for the pending war (de Volkskrant 2003a). In a column, Paul Brill characterized Powell’s performance as “ironclad.” Brill noted that on the whole the experts on the Dutch current affairs shows had been “impressed” by Powell’s speech, which Brill called more compelling “than most had expected.” Sadly, politicians had not shown themselves as open-minded as the experts, for they stuck to their entrenched positions. Brill criticized a member of parliament for the SP for trivializing Powell’s speech as a “sideshow” (in Brill’s phrase) to the efforts of the weapons inspectors. The SP-politician did not seem to understand, according to Brill, that the essential point was that the inspectors kept coming up with nothing because of Iraq’s lies and deceptions (Brill 2003). Stieven Ramdharie (2003) spoke of “circumstantial evidence” which was “incriminating” but did not amount to a smoking gun. Powell’s “evidence” nonetheless appeared to constitute a step in the direction towards war. Ramdharie concluded that Powell’s speech arguably showed the necessity not for war, but for more and more stringent inspections. Bert Lanting (2003) similarly concluded that definitive proof was lacking, but that the “tricky question” now was “why Iraq would make efforts to hide something that does not exist.”

NRC Handelsblad on Powell NRC Handelsblad (2003b) opened an editorial entitled “A solid argument” with the observation that Powell’s presentation had been “strong and impressive,” directly followed by the caveat that Powell had not presented a smoking gun. Nonetheless, the speech was characterized as “having the force of an enumeration that shocks as a result of its quantity, presentation and details” and as “a solid story.” Powell might not have convinced all the skeptics, but it was now reasonable to assume that Saddam was guilty, the paper opined, wrongly predicting that global public opinion would shift to the American side. Despite the praise for Powell, the newspaper wrote about Iraq’s “alleged” WMDs and the “alleged Iraqi threat.” Powell’s information still needed to be verified on the ground, the paper argued. It called for a thorough investigation by the UN, unhindered by stringent deadlines. Yet such an investigation could not take too long, because delays would only favor Saddam. Powell had made some compelling points, the paper wrote, but “it remains hard to prove that America has to preemptively defend itself with an attack against an alleged Iraqi threat.” The editorial concluded nonetheless that Powell had strengthened America’s case for war (NRC Handelsblad 2003b). Two op-eds in NRC Handelsblad strongly supported Powell’s speech. The director of research institute Clingendael, A. Van Staden (2003), called the speech “impressive.” He argued that containment was not an option, because Iraq likely could still produce chemical and biological

weapons. Terrorists might very well obtain these weapons. The second op-ed, by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay (2003) of the Brookings Institute, opened with the authors claiming that Powell had put together a “powerful indictment against Iraq.” Powell had “convincingly shown that war is justifiable.” Iraq was in violation of UN Resolution 1441 by deceiving the inspectors and “by refusing to come clean as to its WMDs.” Although not all the aspects of Powell’s indictment held up, on the whole he had been “convincing.” In a column, Elsbeth Etty (2003) argued that “at the minimum” Powell’s speech had shown that “Iraq systematically and willingly thwarts the weapons inspections.” She denounced containment as a viable option because “a military dictator could be kept in check, but not a crazy tyrant.” In her estimation, Iraq posed a “clear and acute danger,” including to the Netherlands: “We too are in danger.” She thus believed that Iraq possessed WMDs, for how else could it pose a threat? Robert Van de Roer (2003) asserted that Powell “can be satisfied” with himself, for “with his methodical and forceful presentation” he must have convinced “many skeptics and doubters.” Without presenting a smoking gun, the “dove” Powell had nonetheless taken a “giant step towards denouement of the Iraq crisis” by demonstrating the “inevitability of war.” For how could the crisis be resolved otherwise, given the proven unreliability of the Iraqi regime? Powell had made it abundantly clear that the weapons inspections were inefficacious, wrote Van de Roer. In contrast, a compilation of readers’ responses to a query on the NRC-website was highly critical. The question was: “Was Powell’s evidence convincing?” Most of the participants in the discussion were ardent opponents of the war, according to the editor who put together the compilation. Readers denounced Powell’s speech as “war propaganda” and accused the US of selfish intentions (NRC Handelsblad 2003c). In a column Karel Knip (2003a) also showed himself critical of Powell’s speech. He undermined Powell’s assertions about the amount of anthrax that the US estimated Iraq possessed. The numbers kept changing, although “always they are large and threatening,” Knip drily noted, referring to Rangwala, who had compiled the numbers on a website. In another article, Knip (2003b) showed himself more supportive of Powell. He summarized the speech as containing “a lot of old news” and no smoking gun, but also as providing “new” and “salient” information and “a series of clear clues which convincingly demonstrate that Iraq is violating Security Council Resolution 1441.” Yet on March 8, in the middle of a long article, Knip (2003c) stated offhandedly that “many of the accusations” made by Powell had already been shown to be false. The Dutch press failed to give this warranted skepticism anything close to the prominence that was provided to positive evaluations of the Powell-speech.

Conclusion In covering the run-up to the war in Iraq, the Dutch press failed its democratic duties. It betrayed a severe lack of skepticism by providing the unfounded assertions that Iraq had WMDs prominent and often uncritical coverage. The press commentary on Powell stayed neatly within the parameters set by the US beforehand: Powell would not reveal a smoking gun but would still present a convincing case. Even if the press had been ‘balanced’ by affording roughly as much space and prominence to both skeptical and affirming stories on Powell and WMDs, then that would still have meant a dereliction of duty. For there was never any concrete evidence for the existence of WMDs and Powell’s speech did not square with the available evidence at the time. The press marginalized the main and credible anti-war argument, namely the American desire to control Iraq’s oil, and neglected to critically examine the nexus of interests in war between the Dutch government and Shell. The press’s flaws were not random: Dutch journalism followed Washington’s lead. This chapter then provides additional evidence that Dutch foreign coverage structurally favors vested political and economic interests. This chapter also provides evidence for the salience of the Anglo-American political-economic perspective to the study of the Dutch media.

6. Forget the Past: The Media on the US Withdrawal from Iraq This chapter examines the coverage of the US troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 in three Dutch newspapers and on two daily news shows. The newspapers are the same as the ones studied in the previous chapter, namely De Telegraaf, NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant. In the fourth quarter of 2011, De Telegraaf remained the newspaper with the highest circulation. De Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad were still the most widely-read quality dailies (hoi-online.nl). The news shows studied are the signature newscast on the public broadcaster, the 8 o’clock Journaal, and the newscasts on commercial broadcaster RTL4. The coverage is examined as much for what it ignored as for what it contained. To the propaganda model “omissions are of central importance and connect to the boundaries of debate” (Klaehn 2009: 51). The propaganda model exposes the media for applying a double standard. Official enemies get a much harsher treatment than official allies. Journalism prioritizes the narratives spun by institutional sources over the needs and opinions of the population. As Ben Bagdikian (2004: 25) put it, news biases exist in, and can be gleaned from, the “imbalance… in what is chosen – or not chosen – for print or broadcast.” After a short overview of major events in Iraq after the US invasion, first the press coverage is discussed and then the television coverage.

Iraq after the invasion US and British forces swiftly defeated Saddam’s army, causing much ‘collateral damage.’ President George W. Bush wasted no time declaring an end to formal combat during a public relations bonanza on the deck of a US warship. “Mission accomplished,” he said. The Netherlands sent military personnel to the province Al Muthanna. They remained until early 2005 (Jaspers 2005). The Dutch government claimed that the contingent was not part of the occupation forces. This was only formally correct but not in practice. The contingent fell under the command of a British military official (Davids 2010: 266). The hyped WMDs were of course never found. The insurgence against the Western occupiers triggered a vicious civil war between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shias. Revelations about torture perpetrated by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison and other war crimes (Brecher et al. 2005) further undermined the already dismal image of the US in the Middle East. A couple of million of Iraqis fled the violence. Estimates of the number of deaths vary wildly, but it is safe to say that at least more than a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians died from the violence, with credible studies claiming that hundreds of thousands of lives were lost (FAIR 2011). These deaths were in addition to the humanitarian disaster caused by the economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, which according to the UN cost half a million children their lives and did nothing to unseat Saddam (Edwards and Cromwell 2006). Infamously, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, claimed at the time that Washington considered the deaths “worth it” (Mahajan 2001). An unprecedented number of journalists have been killed in Iraq, often by the US. Some observers have raised the possibility that US forces have deliberately targeted the free press (Paterson 2011). It would seem the ultimate irony that representatives of Western media outlets, which did so much to provide the ideological cover for the illegal invasion, would find themselves and their support staff targeted for their lives or imprisoned by Washington. After the violence had died down significantly, major American, British and Dutch oil companies, including Shell, secured contracts worth billions of dollars and moved into the country (Ten Kate 2011). In December 2011, American forces withdrew from Iraq. Sectarian violence continued. Many Iraqis still lived in degrading conditions and prime-minister Nouri al-Maliki hardly acted as an enlightened democrat. Iraq still faced serious problems (Van Vliet 2011) or was even a “failed state” (Hofland 2011). It would be naive to assume that the American troop departure meant that Iraq had become truly sovereign. At the American embassy in Baghdad, which boasted a budget of billions of dollars, worked sixteen thousand people, five thousand of them armed guards (Roelants 2011).

Press coverage of the US withdrawal The first salient feature of the Dutch coverage of the US troop withdrawal in mid-December 2011 is its paucity. The three newspapers published only fourteen articles that provided context to or some kind of evaluation of the war and the withdrawal. In NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant each six such articles were found. Some of the articles were only partially devoted to the withdrawal. What might have caused this surprising lack of coverage? For one, the withdrawal had been a long time coming. Before it even took place it was already ‘old news.’ Among editors there might have existed weariness about news from Iraq. Also, the topic by now lacked a Dutch political dimension. The Dutch soldiers had left Iraq in 2005. The withdrawal could therefore be seen as an American-Iraqi affair. Other foreign events could be deemed more important than the withdrawal, for instance unrest in Syria. Nonetheless, the withdrawal provided a perfect news hook to evaluate US and Dutch involvement in Iraq. The amount of attention in De Telegraaf was especially meager. Only two articles provided an evaluative perspective on the war and the withdrawal. One of these articles (De Telegraaf 2011a) mounted a vehement defense of the decision by George W. Bush to invade Iraq. According to the article, in the weeks after 9/11 he had some evidence that pointed towards the possibility that Al Qaeda possessed WMDs. He then asked himself, according to the article, “Which states would in principle be able and willing to provide Al Qaeda with a bomb?” The answer was Iraq, according to the article, because Saddam “was crazy enough to cooperate with Al Qaida” and “producing WMDs was part of the core business of the Arabic tyrant.” In short, Bush’s intentions had been pure. He had wanted to protect his country from further terrorist attacks. Two core assumptions that this article makes, that in 2003 it was reasonable to assume that Saddam had WMDs and moreover that he would give them to Al Qaeda, a religious organization which despised his secular regime, have no merit.

Methodology The press coverage is evaluated by examining the absence or presence of a number of statements and terms. The articles were coded by the researcher. Recoding by a native Dutch speaker, who received a brief instruction beforehand, yielded an initial intercoder-reliability measure of 0.94 as calculated with the Holsti-formula. A measure of 0.90 or higher is generally considered reliable (Wimmer and Dominick 2006: 169). By discarding a few categories on which substantial disagreement existed and after a discussion of the articles that were coded differently, the degree of agreement was raised to a perfect 1.00. This is exceptional but not remarkable in the context of this study, which focused on simply identifying whether a statement or a term was present or absent in an article.

Casualties and refugees The coverage downplayed the nefarious impact of the invasion and occupation on the Iraqi people (Table 5). These caused a couple of million Iraqi refugees, but this was ignored in the coverage. The official number of American wounded was provided on occasion, but an estimate of Iraqi wounded was not. The number of Iraqi deaths is still debated, but there is widespread agreement that the number is higher than one hundred thousand, whereas about 4,500 American troops lost their lives.

The Dutch papers provided estimates of the number of Iraqi deaths in the range of “tens of thousands” (Elshout 2011a) to “150,000 human lives” (Vreeken 2011). The higher estimates of hundreds of thousands, e.g. in the medical journal The Lancet (Burnham et al. 2006), were not mentioned. Table 5: Articles mentioning casualties and refugees. NRC Volkskrant Telegraaf Totals Official number of US deaths

3/6

2/6

1/2

6/14

Estimate of Iraqi deaths

2/6

2/6

1/2

5/14

Official number of US wounded 1/6

1/6

1/2

3/14

Estimate of Iraqi wounded

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Estimate of Iraqi refugees

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Background to the invasion The coverage in 2011 almost completely left out the crucial events in early 2003 that culminated in the US invasion (Table 6). Key historical facts that reflected badly on the Dutch and US governments were all but ignored. It was as if the press was doing all it could to forget the past. No mention was made of the Powell-speech before the UN, worldwide resistance against the invasion, including among the Dutch population, or the opinion held by almost all legal experts that an invasion was illegal. It should be remembered that only the year before, in 2010, the Commission Davids concluded in its authoritative report that the invasion had been illegal and thus implicitly that the Dutch government had provided support for a crime for which Nazi-leaders were hanged at Nuremberg. Yet only an editorial in NRC Handelsblad (2011a) referred to Dutch government support for the war. The editorial stated that the report by the Commission Davids “clearly showed how lightly a loyal ally [of the US] can let itself be dragged along.” The report was in fact harsher than that, concluding that evidence that Iraq did not have WMDs was ignored by the Dutch government. The only remark in the editorial that can be construed as criticism was the observation, without explanation, that Dutch political support for the invasion lacked “factual arguments.” Table 6: Articles mentioning background to the invasion. NRC Volkskrant Telegraaf Totals US claims of Iraqi WMDs were wrong

2/6

1/6

0/2

3/14

Ties Saddam and Al Qaeda non-existent 0/6

1/6

0/2

1/14

Experts deemed the invasion illegal

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Powell’s speech before the UN

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Dutch state’s support for the war

1/6

0/6

0/2

1/14

Global public opinion opposed invasion 0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Only three out of fourteen articles noted that the main American argument for war, namely that Saddam’s WMDs posed a threat, was wrong. An editorial in NRC Handelsblad (2011a) remarked that the “totalitarian sadist” Saddam “did not possess WMDs” and that “the lack of this alibi for the military intervention” had “a negative effect on the unity of the international community.” But the editorial remained silent on the fact that the (very likely) absence of WMDs was already clear to experts in 2003. It also ignored the well-documented position that the US administration lied or at least exaggerated in order to garner support for an invasion (Isikoff and Corn 2006). NRC-columnist Henk Hofland (2011) wrote the most critical assessment of the American occupation of Iraq, asserting that Bush’s decision to unseat Saddam started a “flood of lies and enormous mistakes.” He then succinctly remarked that “in contrast to what Bush and those around him kept saying [Saddam] had no WMDs.” In de Volkskrant, Arie Elshout (2011b) noted in a factual tone that the WMDs “were not found.” In short, the commentary in 2011 presented a rosy version of the history of the run-up to the invasion from the perspective of the Western belligerents.

Reasons for and consequences of the invasion This bias was even more pronounced in relation to the reasons for the 2003 invasion (Table 7). There was no mention at all of oil interests, specifically the interests of Shell, or ‘imperialism’ as a description of US policy. But affirmations that America’s intentions had been benign were present. For instance, an interview in NRC Handelsblad with an American diplomat opened with his unchallenged observation that the US aims towards Iraq were well-intentioned (Valk 2011). NRCeditor Carolien Roelants (2011) began her evaluation of the US occupation with the statement that “the invasion of Iraq has not, as promised, brought democracy to the region.” As in 2003 (chapter 5), she took at face value the American rhetoric of aiming to bring democracy to the region by attacking Iraq, only noting that things did not work out that way. Table 7: Articles mentioning reasons for and consequences of the invasion. NRC Volkskrant Telegraaf Totals Oil as a possible reason for war

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

The war served Shell’s interests; Shell negotiated before war with London

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

‘Imperialism’ as a possible reason for war

0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Iraq is now free or sovereign or democratic

2/6

2/6

0/2

4/14

Roelants (2011) cited Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta as saying that America’s “mission to make that country [Iraq] sovereign and independent has been accomplished.” She then commented that

“indeed, Iraq is independent.” In an interview in NRC Handelsblad, American writer Karl Marlantes asserted unopposed that the war in Iraq was caused by “stupidity” and not the result of some kind of “conspiracy” (Donkers 2011). Again, US intentions were not questioned. Rather the war in Iraq was seen as the result of honest mistakes. Volkskrant-columnist Paul Brill (2011c) also approvingly cited Panetta, as saying that Iraq was now “free and sovereign.” Brill commented that historians will continue to debate whether the positives resulting from the US invasion outweigh the negatives. On the plus side, he wrote, a “murderous dictator” was unseated, although the intervention also caused death and destruction. On the plus side again, the US freed the region of Saddam, but as a negative result Iran increased its influence. Another negative he identified was damage to the US image. An editorial in NRC Handelsblad (2011a) argued that “positive reflections on the ‘war on terror’” by Panetta and President Barack Obama were “understandable,” for “Iraq has not become another Vietnam. The Americans have left with their heads held high.” In de Volkskrant, Arie Elshout (2011b) offered the same analysis. The withdrawal from Iraq had been nothing like the withdrawal from Vietnam, with its chaotic helicopter scenes in Saigon. He too wrote that the US troops were leaving Iraq with their heads held high. Yet he did not mention that the US ground troops left Iraq suddenly, very early in the morning and without giving notice to the Iraqis, out of fear for attacks (Van Vliet 2011). Elshout (2011b) accepted as fact that the American neoconservatives truly wanted to bring democracy to Iraq, only remarking that they by now must have realized that “democracy cannot be imposed upon a strange people.” He framed the withdrawal as a story of Obama delivering on one of his campaign promises. Yet he did observe that Obama and Panetta’s claims of “all’s well that ends well” betrayed a degree of historical “revisionism” that the public might not be willing to accept. NRC Handelsblad (Roelants 2011) and De Telegraaf (Van Vliet 2011) framed the US withdrawal as a victory for Iran, because its Shiite government was strengthening ties with the Iraqi government in which Shias now had a majority say. Brill (2011c) made the same point in de Volkskrant. Noting the high costs of the war, Roelants wrote that “for that amount the great violator of human rights and aggressor Saddam Hussein was gotten rid of in 2003.” She ignored the issue of the absent WMDs altogether. The US itself did not gain much from the war, she asserted, for contrary to the US government’s plans at the time, Iraq had not developed into a democracy vibrant enough to infect the whole region.

US misconduct in Iraq US misconduct in Iraq has been well established but was ignored by the Dutch press in its retrospectives on the occupation (Table 8). Only one, somewhat oblique, reference to US war crimes was made. In discussing the US, its involvement in Iraq and its “culture of lies,” Hofland (2011) mentioned a book by Vincent Bugliosi, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder. As noted, Hofland’s column constituted the most critical assessment of the withdrawal. Although he wrote it for NRC Handelsblad, the fact that he also writes for the left-wing magazine De Groene Amsterdammer indicates that his position is close to the fringes of what can be expressed in the Dutch mainstream media. The torture practices in Abu Ghraib went unmentioned in the Dutch press. Table 8: Articles mentioning US misconduct in Iraq.

NRC Volkskrant Telegraaf Totals US committed war crimes in Iraq 1/6

0/6

0/2

1/14

US tortured people in Abu Ghraib 0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

Bush versus Saddam Articles frequently referred to Saddam in pejorative ways (Table 9). He was called a “ruthless dictator,” a “great violator of human rights and an aggressor,” and of course “dictator” (Hofland 2011; Roelants 2011; Elshout 2011b). Bush was not characterized pejoratively. Yet he could have been called a violator of international law or a torturer. Or he might have been referred to as a religious zealot or fundamentalist (Domke 2004). It is remarkable that the press in the Netherlands, a country which strongly prefers Democratic presidents in Washington, was so meek in criticizing an extremist Republican president. Table 9: Articles mentioning Bush or Saddam. NRC Volkskrant Telegraaf Totals Pejorative characterization of Saddam 4/6

2/6

2/2

8/14

Pejorative characterization of Bush

0/6

0/2

0/14

0/6

Public opinion Public opinion on the occupation and withdrawal was marginally covered in the Dutch press (Table 10). Only a few references were made to Iraqi public opinion. That many Americans are now of the opinion that the war in Iraq was immoral, was ignored (CNN/ORC 2011; Montopoli 2010). Table 10: Articles mentioning public opinion. NRC Volkskrant Telegraaf Totals Iraqi public opinion on war/withdrawal 0/6

2/6

1/2

3/14

Dutch public opinion on war/withdrawal 0/6

0/6

0/2

0/14

US public opinion on war/withdrawal

0/6

0/2

0/14

0/6

TV news on the US withdrawal The public broadcaster’s 8 o’clock Journaal produced only one item on the US withdrawal. It was broadcast on December 18 as a minor foreign news story (nos.nl). The paucity of attention paid to the withdrawal by public television is noteworthy. Its daily 8 o’clock news show runs for about 25 minutes, uninterrupted by commercials. The Iraq item was only 1.31 minutes long. The item started with the assertion that the “most controversial war of the last ten years” had ended. “The regime of Saddam Hussein was unseated,” according to the item, but “the toll for both the US and Iraq was high,” a remark that seemed to suggest that Americans and Iraqis had suffered in roughly equal measure. The item continued to state that “tens of thousands of Iraqis” had lost their lives, an unusually low estimate, and “4,500 Americans.” The item showed an emotional American soldier applauding by the side of the road, as he watched US troops leave Iraq. “A job well done,” he told the camera. The item then stated that “according to the Iraqis, the Americans were nothing less than occupiers,” but that “Americans regard the departure as the end of a successful action.” Yet according to an opinion poll by CNN/ORC in mid-December, 2011, 77 percent of Americans were of the opinion that the US achieved none or only a few of its goals, while only 22 percent believed that the US achieved most of its aims. The poll also showed that half of the US population believed that the war was morally wrong, a perspective absent from the Dutch coverage of the withdrawal. A CBS News poll in August 2010 showed that according to most Americans the US hardly achieved anything in Iraq and should never have invaded (Montopoli 2010). The Journaal-item asserted that “the outcome of the war was less positive to the Iraqis” than to the Americans. An Iraqi civilian said that he was glad that the Americans were leaving, as they had killed so many of his compatriots. According to the item, at least one thing was clear: the Americans were leaving behind a different Iraq than the one they encountered in 2003, namely “a fledgling democracy” that will have to chart its own course but where “violence is still a daily occurrence.” The on-air sources were a US soldier and an Iraqi civilian, in that order. The public news show ignored salient issues that put US involvement in Iraq in a distinctly less favorable light: the illegality of the war, the missing WMDs, the millions of Iraqi refugees, American war crimes and the role of oil interests. Also ignored was the Dutch complicity in the war. The observation that the US had removed a tyrant put a positive spin on the invasion and had the effect of redeeming the US’s role. RTL Nieuws broadcast its main item on the US troops leaving Iraq on December 14. Presented by US correspondent Erik Mouthaan, it was much longer than the public news show’s (2.39m). The on-air sources were, in order of appearance: Obama, a US soldier, George W. Bush and another US soldier. Although all the on-air sources were Americans, the item was distinctly critical. It recounted that the promised WMDs were not found, that the US did not appear to have a plan drawn up for a post-Saddam Iraq, that a civil war had broken out and a “terror campaign” against the “occupier.” Mouthaan spoke of “abuse of power and torture,” while pictures from Abu Ghraib flashed across the screen. The estimate of Iraqi deaths was 150 thousand to 300 thousand – the highest estimate in the Dutch media. The high monetary costs of the war for the US were mentioned and the fact that “sixteen thousand diplomats and CIA officers” remained in the country, guarded by “controversial” American security firms. The item concluded with Mouthaan correctly asserting that most Americans now saw

the invasion and occupation as not having been worth it. An American soldier was shown saying that he did not know the answer to the question whether the deaths of his fellow soldiers were “justified.” RTL Nieuws broadcast two more Iraq items, both on December 18. The first one (1.36m) stated that the US had toppled the dictator Saddam, had arrested him and put him on trial, after which he was executed. No other motives than disposing of a dictator were suggested as having contributed to the decision to go to war. The US paid a heavy price, the item noted, namely 4,500 deaths. Iraqi deaths were not mentioned. The item concluded by mentioning that some feared that the American departure might lead to another civil war in Iraq. The sources that talked on camera were, first, three US soldiers and then an Iraqi civilian. The second item broadcast on December 18, during a different news show, was only 43 seconds long. It too mentioned only US deaths. Two sources talked on camera, both US soldiers. The last soldier spoke of “a job well done.”

Conclusion This content analysis confirms that, as the propaganda model predicts, the Dutch media suffer from a persistent pro-American bias. The coverage of the US withdrawal from Iraq was notable for its scarcity and uncritical treatment of the US government, and for ignoring the Dutch complicity in the invasion and occupation. The main issues that had made that war “one of the most controversial of the last ten years” were all but ignored: the illegality of the war, the large-scale global resistance, the plausible, even proven assumption that oil was a major reason for the invasion and the absence of WMDs. The extent of Iraqi suffering was downplayed. Saddam was vilified but Bush was not. US intentions were assumed to be benign.

7. Euros over Citizens: The Press’s Narrow Definition of Democracy During the euro crisis, European political and economic elites were heavily invested in forcing austerity measures upon Greece, in order to prevent the collapse of the common currency and that country’s departure from the euro zone. Countries like France and Germany and also the Netherlands aimed to discipline Greece into adopting the austerity measures and force it to further liberalize its economy. Loans that Greece urgently needed were used as leverage. In Greece, the euro crisis led to riots and strikes. In late 2011 Greek prime-minister George Papandreou dropped a bombshell by proposing to hold a referendum on the implementation of more austerity measures. Politicians throughout Europe, including in the Netherlands, condemned the proposal, thereby revealing their shallow commitment to democratic politics and preference for technocratic solutions (Roos 2011). German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble went so far as to suggest that Greece would be better off were it led not by political parties but by a technocratic government (Valenta 2012). The disruption of European politics as usual resulting from Papandreou’s proposal provides an opportunity to examine the depth of the commitment to democratic deliberations among Dutch journalists. That Papandreou’s motivation for proposing the referendum was, at least in part, political and thus not purely out of concern for fair democratic processes matters not (Roos 2011). Greece had the right to consult its citizens on the far-reaching policies. The likely effects of the austerity measures were widely understood to be detrimental to the living conditions of many Greek citizens. This chapter first critiques the current state of Dutch democracy and then suggests on the basis of existing scholarship that Dutch journalists employ a narrow definition of democracy that benefits elite interests and affirms the hardly democratic status quo. The subsequent analysis of the press reception of Papandreou’s proposal tests that hypothesis. Did the press highlight the democratic rights of the Greeks or, conversely, the perceived need to rescue the euro? In other words, did the press value national democratic processes over the needs of European capitalism or vice versa (Roos 2011)?

Dutch democracy in crisis Dutch political elitism has deep historical roots. The opinion of a scholar in the 1880s that “democracy weakens the moral consciousness of the people” reflected the prevailing attitude of the educated classes at the time (De Jong 1967: 22). According to prominent sociologist J.A.A. Van Doorn (2009: 268), in the nineteenth century the four main groups in the Netherlands (Catholics, Protestants, Socialists and free-market Liberals) had in common a “remarkable elitism,” which was even more pronounced than in many other countries. In 1922, still almost a quarter of the socialdemocratic members of parliament were (descendents of) noblemen or patricians (Van Doorn 2009: 272). This elitism has hardly disappeared. The bourgeoisie that guarded “the general interest as it saw it” has been succeeded by “institutions that pretend to do the same. The mass of the electorate does not play a role.” Political parties have left their ideological differences behind. International organizations like the European Union (EU) and NATO control defense and monetary policies (Van Doorn 2009: 398-9). In Brussels civil servants hold the power and they are far removed from, and unresponsive to, voters (Sommer 2011b). This relegation of power to the hardly democratic EU is ongoing, a development which deeply worries, among others, philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Sommer 2011a). Van Doorn (2009: 491) points out that it is “practically unanimously” accepted that Dutch democracy is in a “stubborn crisis.” This realization is current “not only in circles of experts and insiders, but also among the electorate.” The crisis of Dutch democracy certainly is somewhat of a truism among leading political scientists. Jos De Beus for instance posits that “The legitimacy of Dutch democracy is a wholesale form of self-deceit and deception” (Hamelink 2004: 138, note 4; Van Westerloo 2003). It is, according to Cees Hamelink, a “big contemporary political lie” to say that Dutch society is a democracy: a “bureaucracy” is a more apt description. The media only rarely expose that lie: “Usually they obediently report on the day-to-day operations of the system and neglect to ask fundamental questions about the system itself” (Hamelink 2004: 21). The “malaise in politics” can in part be explained by the “economization of politics” starting in the 1980s with the rise of neoliberalism, characterized by among other things the privatization of many government agencies. This process constituted a reversal of the attempted politicization of the economy in the progressive 1970s, which aimed to bring the economy under political and thereby, at least in theory, public control (Van Doorn 2009: 492). The “societal contract between capital and labor,” with the government performing the role of mediator if necessary, has been replaced by a “consumer society” in which the individual is no match for his “attackers,” namely “salespeople, advertisers and market analysts,” who together are far more powerful than the government. Social democracy has been “sidetracked... the formerly active citizen has been replaced by the passive consumer who is not interested in politics” (Van Doorn 2009: 500). Political parties have lost much of their significance. Almost 320 thousand Dutch voters, 2.6 percent of the electorate, are member of a political party. It is estimated that only 50 thousand to 60 thousand party members are politically active (SCP 2011: 193). Political debates routinely shun ideological terms in favor of a framework of efficiency. The democratic process is often seen as inefficient, because debates cost time and might lead to controversy. Paradoxically, in Dutch politics “political principles and ideological preferences play a

marginal role.” Politics has become a “technocracy with a human face” (Van Doorn 2009: 470-2). Election campaigns focus more and more on the character of the politician, who is assisted by wellpaid media trainers and pr-advisors (Van Doorn 2009: 452). Parliament does not act as a check on the executive branch; the executive and legislative branches have merged together (Chavannes 2009: 28; Van Doorn 2009: 461). The executive branch often informs parliament wrongly, partially, or not at all (Enthoven 2011). No wonder that for years a solid majority of the Dutch population has favored a strengthening of democratic mechanisms, for instance by establishing direct elections of mayors or holding referenda on important topics (SCP 2011: 69-70). Sociologist Willem Schinkel too argues that the Dutch political parties have largely done away with their ideological differences. Politics has become “problem management.” All the parties accept and work within the same neoliberal framework. Politicians pretend that politics is “neutral,” that ideology is something of the past, whereas in reality the political system is “closely tied” to the economic system of neoliberalism, which is in fact strongly ideological. The “contempt” for democracy among the ruling political elites in the Netherlands, both on the left and the right, is “enormous,” as illustrated by their dismissive reactions to Papandreou’s proposal to hold a referendum. Democracy as a concept is hardly examined, thought about or debated and therefore Dutch democracy is “almost undemocratic.” In the Netherlands, according to Schinkel, “democracy is mostly a lifestyle, an attitude of capitalistic freedom of choice and moral superiority” (De Rek 2012). A few prominent journalists have acknowledged the sorry state of Dutch democracy. Elites believe in democracy only if that means a system that is securely controlled by “sensible people,” who fear participatory democracy and know when it is time to exclude the population at large and hammer out some compromise among themselves, according to Hendrik Jan Schoo (2008: 121-2). Queen Beatrix, the official head of the Dutch state from 1980 until April 2013, had a reputation of interfering with governmental issues, although solid evidence for the persistent rumors is hard to come by (Schoo 2008: 141-2). The Dutch “guided democracy” is “patronizing” and “very indirect.” It is a political system dominated by regents, with relatively few elected offices. The magazine The Economist captured its essence with the phrase, “Daddy knows best” (Schoo 2008: 251). The rise of right-wing, populist politics in the first decade of the twenty-first century can partly be explained as a revolt against the lack of truly democratic structures (Chavannes 2009: 11; Schoo 2008: 180). Politics has lost meaning to the same degree that it has relinquished grip on the economy. The Netherlands has become a “market state” (Chavannes 2009: 10). The state, “with almost East-German diligence” and more thoroughly than the countries surrounding it, sold off many of its operations, for instance the airline KLM and the postal service PTT (Chavannes 2009: 35, 38). More and more Dutch companies, like the big publishers Elsevier and VNU, are taken over by foreign corporations (Chavannes 2009: 89). According to Privacy International, the Netherlands, together with the US and Britain, is one of the foremost Big Brother-countries. The balance between the right to privacy and the tracking down of criminals and terrorists has been shattered in favor of the latter pursuit (Chavannes 2009: 229). Journalist Joris Luyendijk (2010) drew five devastating conclusions in his ethnographic study of Dutch politics. First, he wondered whether the politicians, pr-practitioners, lobbyists and journalists in The Hague, the seat of government, should not be seen as one “tribe,” instead of four separate groups. Luyendijk noted the phenomenon of the revolving door: “Crudely speaking, journalism seems a vestibule of the better paying public relations and politics a jump-off point to the also often better

paying lobbying” (Luyendijk 2010: 23). The reality that journalists need pr-practitioners makes the former vulnerable to the routine threats leveled by the latter, a practice that is regarded as normal by everyone involved. One politician revealed to Luyendijk that complaints to editors-in-chief sometimes result in a promise of “more positive reporting” in the future (Luyendijk 2010: 69). Luyendijk’s second conclusion was that the Netherlands has “one of the most closed-off political cultures in the West.” Lobbyists are not required to register, as they are in the US. Luyendijk (2010: 25-9) could find no data on how members of parliament voted on bills or if they had ties to corporations or NGOs or who they work for after leaving parliament. The big taboo that Luyendijk encountered in The Hague concerned the issue whether the power in fact still lies there. Some got almost angry when confronted with the question and most were unwilling to confirm the answer that only the lobbyists seemed to give without hesitation: the power lies in Brussels of course. Lobbyists “spend 90 percent of their time and energy” influencing civil servants in The Hague and politicians in Brussels and at the most 10 percent on politicians in The Hague, “the little puppets,” in Luyendijk’s phrase. In contrast, the Dutch news is for 90 percent concerned with politicians in The Hague and only for 10 percent with civil servants and EU politics (Luyendijk 2010: 50-2). Thus the news confirms the by and large illusion that Dutch politics is still important. This illusion serves the interests of journalists, lobbyists, pr-practitioners and politicians alike: the whole tribe. Luyendijk’s third conclusion was that members of parliament lack the means and the logistical support to do their job well, with the result that they depend on civil servants and lobbyists (Luyendijk 2010: 50). Many questions asked by members of parliament in session originate with lobbyists (Luyendijk 2010: 57). Luyendijk’s fourth conclusion (2010: 73) was that the methods that pr-practitioners use to influence the news and polish up the image of politicians are indeed effective. His final conclusion was that for the participants there is no escape from the little milieu that makes up Dutch politics: journalists need their sources tomorrow too (Luyendijk 2010: 103). This glaring democratic deficit has not led to major popular protests, probably because, by objective standards, the Netherlands is one of the most livable countries in the world. The country has the highest income level in the EU after Luxemburg and in 2008 and 2010 it had the lowest score on the misery index, which combines inflation, budget deficit and unemployment. In 2010, unemployment was about 5 percent, the lowest in the EU (SCP 2011: 335-7). Alienation from politics is less widespread than in many other Western countries. A majority of the population considers itself to be interested in politics (SCP 2011: 197) and voters still turn up in reasonably high numbers for parliamentary elections. From 1982 to 2006 the percentage of voters was on average about 80 percent, according to the Central Bureau for Statistics (cbs.nl). In 2010 it was 75 percent (Poort and Verschoor 2010). Despite the rise of digital technologies, the feared fragmentation of the Dutch public sphere has not come about (Schoenbach and De Waal 2011). The public news programs are still widely watched (de Volkskrant 2011b). These and other factors make that the Dutch, despite significant dissatisfaction, still have quite a lot of faith in their institutions compared to other Europeans. Yet in 2012 and 2013 the Netherlands too started to feel the effects of economic stagnation, with unemployment rising to over 8 percent (Van den Dool 2013).

Dutch journalism and democracy The average Dutch journalist is a man of fifty years old, with a college degree and left-of-center political beliefs. He values objective reporting and abhors the influence of commercial imperatives on his profession. Although he appreciates feedback, he does not believe that the public should have more influence on news content. He believes that journalism should serve the public interest by acting as a check on politics, but he also believes that journalists should not be activists. According to him, it is not the task of journalism to advocate for the rights of the weaker groups in society or to put issues on the political agenda (Pleijter et al. 2010). At least one serious problem follows from such a role conception, which can be summarized as adhering to Anglo-American standards of journalistic professionalism and objectivity. In James Carey’s (2000) words: Journalists can be independent or objective about everything else but they cannot be aloof about democracy, for it forms the ground condition of their craft. Without the institutions of democracy, journalists are reduced to propagandists or entertainers. The passion for democracy is the one necessary bond journalists must have with the public and their colleagues in other crafts – law, teaching – who are equally dependent on democratic institutions.

It might be expected that Dutch journalism does not exhibit or stimulate a passion for democracy. Indeed, it has been argued that Dutch journalism is an activity by elites for elites. As Joke Hermes wrote (2005: 25), “News professionals form an information elite.” They depict citizens as “consumers” or as “children.” Citizens get mentioned only when they “have a problem or are a problem” (Hermes 2005: 11). The news media do not stimulate active citizenship. Journalism and politics are tightly interwoven and share the conviction that “reason and emotion, politicians and the people are… opposites” (Hermes 2005: 28). Dutch journalism can be expected to advance an “administrative model” of democracy, which “rests on the premise that ordinary citizens lack the interest and expertise to effectively govern themselves.” In this “highly restricted model of democracy… citizens involve themselves in little more than the election and occasionally the ejection of political leaders.” Government is thought of as for the people but not by the people. The main function of journalism that flows from this narrow definition of democracy is one of a “burglar alarm,” to be set off when elected officials go too far (Christians et al. 2009: 99-100). The administrative model closely resembles Walter Lippmann’s (1922) pessimistic analysis of the possibilities of substantial citizen involvement in governmental processes in complex, large-scale societies and also his solution: an elite that guides the public towards the correct decisions. Democracy more broadly conceived, for instance civic or direct models of democracy (Christians et al. 2009), can be expected to be marginalized in Dutch journalism.

Methodology The reactions in four Dutch newspapers to Papandreou’s proposal were studied from the day after the Greek prime-minister made his announcement, November 2, until November 7, 2011. Within those six days, the proposal was taken off the table again. The selected papers include NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant and Trouw. The centrist NRC Handelsblad and the progressive de Volkskrant are by reputation comparable to The New York Times and The Washington Post in the US. Trouw is a small, quality paper with religious-conservative roots. USA Today is the closest American equivalent to the fourth paper studied, the populist-conservative De Telegraaf. In the last quarter of 2011, De Telegraaf was the newspaper with the highest circulation in the Netherlands. De Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad were the most widely-read quality dailies (hoi-online.nl). This study examines letters to the editor, op-eds, editorials and other articles in which an opinion was expressed about the referendum proposal. News articles were excluded because they do not provide an explicit evaluation of the referendum. Interviews were included when an opinion about the issue was expressed, even if the opinion was not the journalist’s. Such an opinion indirectly says something about journalists’ attitudes, as the interviewee was selected for his or her opinion. The opinions expressed in interviews indicate what journalists consider the legitimate range of opinion. By examining interviews a comparison can be made between the opinions expressed by journalists themselves and the opinions of interviewees. Letters to the editor and articles in which readers’ reactions are discussed, are included in this study because they can indicate, although not prove, whether there possibly existed a gap in how the public judged the proposal compared to journalists. An article or letter to the editor was coded for whether it on the whole supported or denounced the proposal. In a third coding category articles were put that evaluated the proposal but did not take a clear side. The researcher coded the articles and a native Dutch speaker recoded them. The recoding yielded an intercoder-reliability measure of 0.87 as calculated by the Holsti-formula. This is somewhat lower than the desired 0.90, but measures above 0.80 are often acceptable (Wimmer and Dominick 2006: 169). A reason for the relatively low intercoder-reliability measure is that the total number of examined articles and letters to the editor was small (namely 46), with the consequence that disagreement on one article already substantially lowered the intercoder-reliability measure. First discussed are a selection of articles that agitated against the proposal and then articles that defended it. Finally, readers’ reactions are discussed.

Against the referendum NRC Handelsblad, Trouw and De Telegraaf overwhelmingly denounced the plan for a referendum (Table 11; also Van Groesen). In two editorials, De Telegraaf called Papandreou’s proposal “insane” (2011c), “foolhardy” and a “desperate offensive move” (2011b). According to the paper, Europe was fed up with the Greek “antics” (2011b). World leaders had had it with the “deceiving” Greeks, who were guilty of “blackmail” (2011c). The paper regarded as justified the heavy pressure exerted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy on Papandreou to relent (2011c), for the proposal threw the financial markets in “complete chaos” (2011b) and threatened “the future of Europe and the euro” (2011c). A third editorial in De Telegraaf (2011d) heaved a big sigh of relief at the news that the referendum, that “idiotic proposal,” would not be held. Thankfully, the editorial asserted, the Greeks had regained “some common sense.” A column in De Telegraaf (2011e) referred to Papandreou as a “loser,” who made a fool of Europe before he “finally” relented. The editor-in-chief of Trouw, Willem Schoonen, opined that politicians all over Europe were justifiably angry with Papandreou, because his proposal exacerbated the “current financial tensions.” Schoonen explained that his paper had not dedicated an editorial to Papandreou the day after he announced his proposal because it had chosen to focus on a domestic issue. But had the paper written an editorial, it would have argued against the proposal, for the future of the euro “is too important to submit to the people.” A referendum “can of course be a beautiful democratic instrument” but not when the topic is complex, as in this case. Moreover, calling for a referendum suggests that policymaking is not already democratic. Yet the politicians that decide the future of the euro were elected by the people (Schoonen 2011). Another article in Trouw (2011b) opened with the assertion that Papandreou had proposed his referendum “in a fit of insanity… as if the crisis in Europe is not already deep enough.” The consequences had been dire: the stock markets plummeted, government leaders were “aghast” and “populations lost even more faith in a good ending.” A third article in Trouw (2011a) argued that Papandreou had shown “recklessness” by proposing the referendum; for the “disastrous” initiative threatened to frustrate the rescue plan for Greece. NRC Handelsblad addressed Papandreou’s proposal in four editorials. The first one (2011c), headlined “a very risky referendum,” opined that “a more dangerous decision can hardly be imagined.” Fortunately, a referendum would likely be held quickly; at least the “uncertainty” would be short. That was the only good news to report. Papandreou had sent a “shock wave” through Europe. He would have plenty to explain at the upcoming G20 summit in France. Nonetheless, the editorial asserted that a “nation has the right to organize its democracy the way it sees fit,” which can include holding a referendum. The “outrage” in the Dutch parliament was “partly hypocritical.” Leftleaning parties like the PvdA and GroenLinks had supported introducing referenda in Dutch politics. Therefore they had no right to protest too loudly now that the Greeks, “albeit much too sudden, threaten to choose a referendum.” But in the end, Papandreou’s initiative exemplified why representative democracy is preferable to democracy by referendum, for the Greeks would likely vote against the budget cuts, which were nonetheless necessary.

Table 11: Articles evaluating the referendum proposal. Positive

Negative

Neither

Trouw

1

6

1

De Telegraaf

0

5

2

NRC Handelsblad

2

6

0

de Volkskrant

4

5

5

Totals

7

22

8

The second NRC-editorial (2011d) called Papandreou’s proposal a “time bomb” under the policy measures aimed at rescuing the euro. The editorial described as a “logical reaction” the announcement by Merkel and Sarkozy that Greece would not qualify for new loans as long as it did not agree to the austerity measures. The third NRC-editorial (2011e), headlined “Zigzagging Papandreou,” stated that “what has the appearance of a brilliant political strategy later sometimes turns out to be nothing more than a blunder which unexpectedly paid off.” Time would tell whether Papandreou’s “zigzagging” around a referendum would fall into this category. Yet Papandreou had likely been playing “panic football.” The two main political parties in Greece, Papandreou’s socialist Pasok and the conservative ND, should “muster the courage to defy the popular fury and acknowledge that further [budget] cuts are unavoidable.” The fourth NRC-editorial (2011f) opined that Greek politics had shown its “most capricious side” and called the proposal “unblessed.” The commentary in de Volkskrant was almost evenly divided between positive and negative appraisals. Paul Brill opposed the referendum. The foreign affairs commentator observed that when viewed from a distance the consternation in the European capitals following Papandreou’s announcement was somewhat “pathetic,” as the “uproar” among politicians showed yet again that too much citizen participation in “crucial European decisions” is not appreciated. Yet, asserted Brill, the “harsh reality” was that the “luxury” of taking a few steps back was not available. This was “no time for democratic antics.” A referendum was the wrong initiative because it would only increase the uncertainty already existing in Europe. The plan to rescue the euro was not perfect, but it was all Europe had to avert a debt crisis (Brill 2011a). In another article, Brill (2011b) hailed the retraction of the referendum proposal and wrote that Merkel and Sarkozy had “justly” halted further aid to Greece. An op-ed in de Volkskrant written by two economics professors argued that the “Greek referendum fiasco” might lead to a new government of national unity. If so, that would mean the “happy denouement of the recent drama.” For until now Greek leaders had been arguing among themselves and had failed to make clear to the population the “need for reforms” (Eijffinger and Mujagic 2011).

In favor of the referendum Arguments in favor of a referendum were clearly in the minority (Table 11). Moreover, such arguments often were made not by journalists but by other observers, for instance academics. In three interviews a referendum was presented as a worthy initiative. In Trouw, philosopher Hans Achterhuis pointed out that it was “extremely strange” that Dutch parliamentarian Ronald Plasterk had rejected the proposal. Plasterk argued that the crisis should be solved by experts and not by citizens, but, said Achterhuis, “We know from experience these last couple of years that the solutions of experts do not work” (Steenhuis 2011). In de Volkskrant, political scientist Bastiaan Van Apeldoorn said that it was wrong of politicians to criticize the referendum. Politicians who rejected the proposal for a referendum were in effect saying, “We are democrats, but not right now.” Van Apeldoorn noted that, “Whether you like it or not, every population has the sovereign right to take its fate into its own hands, for instance by refusing to pay back its debts. A country can make choices and it is not crazy at all to submit that choice via a referendum to the people” (Persson 2011). In another interview in de Volkskrant, Greek parliamentarian Panagiotis Kouroumplis said that he regarded the timing of the proposal to be unfortunate. He was nonetheless in favor of a referendum because in a democracy it is “always a good idea” to consult the citizens. Kouroumplis then raised the question: “Why are the European leaders so afraid of the voice of the people?” His answer was that they feared that the protests would spread from Greece to their own countries: “The citizens should not let the [European] Union be hijacked by the capitalist system. Politics and democracy should triumph” (Van der Ziel 2011). In an op-ed in NRC Handelsblad, a professor argued that the attempts to rescue the euro were sidelining democracy and that the Greeks were justified in their protests. Papandreou’s proposal was an attempt to at least “uphold somewhat of a democratic appearance.” How would the Dutch react if foreign powers were about to do away with their collective bargaining agreements (Klamer 2011)? A few journalists wrote favorably of a referendum. The NRC-correspondent in Greece noted that were the proposal to lead to Papandreou’s downfall, then at least many Greeks would consider him a “true democrat, instead of the puppet of Brussels and the financial markets, which he appeared to be until now” (De Koning 2011). De Volkskrant’s Sheila Sitalsing addressed the issue in two columns. She ironically referred to parliamentarian Plasterk, who had said that a referendum would not be in the interest of the Greek people, as a “great democrat,” and observed that “apparently one can have too much democracy in Europe. Or the wrong kind of democracy” (Sitalsing 2011a). In the second column, written after the proposal had been taken off the table, Sitalsing lambasted Plasterk again, saying that he had forever lost the right to wax about the deficiencies of European democracy, “just like the rest of Europe’s elite, which anyway has never been a fan” of democratic deliberations. The citizen was regarded as a “risk” (Sitalsing 2011b).

Readers’ reactions In two articles, editors discussed readers’ reactions to the proposal. In Trouw, Schoonen (2011) noted that most letter writers and those who reacted on the newspaper’s website showed themselves sympathetic towards Papandreou and the referendum. Most of their anger was directed at the politicians who criticized him. As noted, Schoonen then explained that had his newspaper written an editorial, it would have argued that the people should not be consulted on a topic as grave as the future of the euro. De Telegraaf discussed readers’ reactions to a digital poll. Forty-five percent of the reactions were positive towards a referendum and 53 percent negative (Jansen 2011). Nine letters to the editor mentioned the proposed referendum, seven in de Volkskrant and two in Trouw. Four letters argued for a referendum and one against (Table 12). Although the evidence is far too fragmentary to allow for solid conclusions, it appears not unlikely that the Dutch public as a whole was more supportive of a referendum than the journalists at Trouw, De Telegraaf and NRC Handelsblad. Table 12: Letters to the editor on the referendum proposal. Positive

Negative

Neither

Trouw

1

0

1

De Telegraaf

0

0

0

NRC Handelsblad

0

0

0

de Volkskrant

3

1

3

Totals

4

1

4

Conclusion This content analysis indicates that democratic sentiments are only shallowly entrenched among Dutch journalists. The dominant position in the press coincided with the dominant position among European politicians: an unmistakably negative attitude towards a Greek referendum. De Telegraaf was uniform in condemning the “idiotic” proposal. NRC Handelsblad and Trouw also overwhelmingly criticized Papandreou’s move. Only in the left-leaning de Volkskrant were positive and negative evaluations evenly present. Readers’ reactions indicate, although by no means prove, that the Dutch population at large possibly was more sympathetic to a referendum than established journalism. The irony of course is that journalists justify their profession by claiming that they serve and make possible democracy. Yet the press regards the citizen more often as a risk that needs to be neutralized than as a viable autonomous participant in democratic decision making. In other words, the press’s definition of democracy is inordinately narrow, even “almost undemocratic.” The study presented in this chapter is quite limited in scope. More research is needed that evaluates whether the Dutch news promotes democracy or does the opposite. One of the causes of the current lack of such research is the disappearance of the political-economic perspective on the Dutch media in the early 1980s. The few scholars and journalists who advocated that perspective called for democratization of the media system and society (chapter 3). That call has since almost never been heard. The scholarship would do well to again adopt a more substantive definition of democracy when measuring media performance.

8. Where to Take Dutch Journalism This chapter summarizes the conclusions drawn in this book and discusses some of their implications and avenues for further research. Then some suggestions are made for starting to answer the question how the documented weaknesses of Dutch journalism and democracy might be ameliorated. Almost all scholars have examined journalism in the Netherlands from within a socialdemocratic or liberal (in the American meaning of the word) framework. Consistent with this ideological orientation, the main thrust of the scholarship has wrongly concluded, or adopted as an untested assumption, that Dutch journalism since the 1970s has adequately performed its function in a democracy. Only over the last decade or so has criticism of Dutch journalism become somewhat sharper. The first part of this book attempted to reframe the scholarship on Dutch journalism. The aim was to demonstrate the viability of a critical political-economic outlook at the expense of a liberal perspective. The examination of Dutch media history concluded that in the historiography James Curran’s liberal reading has been dominant but that, just as in Britain and the US, a radical reading provides a viable alternative. The critical scholars in the 1970s, drawing inspiration from Karl Marx and Jürgen Habermas, already proposed to regard Dutch journalism mainly as a reflection of the wider political economy. They concluded that journalism primarily functions as a tool in the hands of the powers that be. Their analyses closely match those of American political economists like Ben Bagdikian, Edward Herman, Noam Chomsky and Robert McChesney. These Dutch scholars’ emphasis on the detrimental effects of commercially-driven, professional journalism was quite astute, yet they failed to provide ample evidence to show that journalism was indeed biased in favor of the interests of political and economic elites. This book argues that the extent to which Dutch journalism is market-driven has increased manifold since the 1970s and that therefore the salience of that era’s critical perspective has also increased manifold. Additionally, this book has provided empirical evidence that shows that the Dutch news up until the present does indeed exhibit a pro-elite bias. A clear symptom of how the ideological outlook of most scholars has influenced their work is their assessment of Dutch democracy. Media scholars assume that, on the whole, democracy functions just fine. Yet scholarship produced by political scientists, sociologists and others shows the deep, fatal flaws of really existing Dutch democracy. Because media scholars hardly ever acknowledge these flaws, the extent to which journalism is derelict in its duties also remains out of sight. The main conclusions drawn in this book are that Dutch journalism suffers from the same flaws that political economists have identified for Anglo-American journalism and that these flaws stem from the same cause: the commercial underpinnings of the media industry. Dutch journalism does not perform well its main function in a democracy. It often fails to present independently-verified information that provides an accurate picture of important political and economic realities upon which citizens can base decisions aimed at furthering the common good. Dutch journalism mostly replicates the worldview of the dominant economic and political powers in the Netherlands and the West in general, especially the US. Throughout the twentieth century and into the current one, Dutch journalism has been serving more as a handmaiden to power than as a watchdog.

Although national media systems differ from each other, this book suggests that, regarding news content on foreign affairs and economic issues, we can take the Netherlands out of Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini’s Democratic Corporatist Model and put it into the Liberal Model. The differences between the media system in the Netherlands on the one hand and the systems in the US and Britain on the other are not big enough to lead to truly different coverage of political and economic issues. Moreover, the similarities between the three media systems are far more significant than the differences. Like its American and British counterparts, the Dutch media industry is highly concentrated and owned by economic elites who first and foremost aim to make a profit. Dutch journalism too depends on advertising revenue, has to contest with a much stronger pr-industry, is highly professionalized and functions within a neoliberal climate. Therefore, a successful theoretical model devised by American political economists, the propaganda model, can also be used as a fruitful framework to study Dutch journalism, although in the Netherlands the five filters are likely not as forceful mechanisms of censorship as they are in the US. Dutch public broadcasting, which is facing severe budget cuts and politically-mandated reorganizations, is too weak to function as an effective counterweight to the prevailing commercial logic. The Dutch political spectrum extends further to the left than the American one, yet regarding economic and foreign policy issues, news in the Netherlands and the US is flawed in the same way. It is likely that the bias is less outspoken in the Netherlands. Yet a focus on the similarities between Dutch and American journalism is more illuminating than insistence on the differences. The content analyses illustrate that Dutch journalism produces news and commentary that, as the first part of this book predicts, favor vested political and economic interests. The quality press and the largest circulation newspaper covered the run-up to the war in Iraq in ways that, to say the least, did not consistently or effectively challenge the vast but often crude propaganda campaign emanating from Washington, London and also The Hague. Often the version of reality concocted by the main belligerents was given undue credence. Absent from the coverage of the US troop withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 was much information that shed a negative light on the invasion and occupation. What was reported was a highly selective version of events, namely a version that whitewashed the illegal war. The main thrust of the press commentary regarding Papandreou’s proposal for a referendum on the euro crisis was that the future of the euro should be left to the experts and politicians. The commentary revealed the almost antidemocratic attitudes prevalent among Dutch journalists. Digital technologies have not undermined and might even have cemented existing power relations. The analysis of two events in 2011, Papandreou’s referendum proposal and the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, shows that the press continues to display a pro-elite bias, the internet notwithstanding. With all the documentation regarding the Iraq war available online, and with the fog of war dissipated, the extent to which the Dutch press continued to exhibit such a clear pro-American bias was both expected and remarkable. As the media industry continues to constitute an integral part of society’s power structure, the expectation must be that digital technologies will not diminish the pro-elite bias in mainstream journalism. In other words, the propaganda model will continue to hold explanatory power until journalism is no longer an integral part of the market. Although digital technologies provide excellent, low-cost opportunities for promoting counter-narratives to mainstream journalism, this potential has not been realized in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is a small country, but the conclusions of this book reverberate across national boundaries. The applicability of the Anglo-American tradition of political economy to other

Continental European countries needs to be studied more. Specifically, showing that the propaganda model applies to the Netherlands begs the question to what extent the model can also be applied to other European countries, for instance Germany, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Those countries are similar to the Netherlands in many ways, for instance in the presence of a strong public broadcaster and a political spectrum that extends further to the left than in the US. The hypothesis resulting from this book is that the propaganda model can also be applied to those countries. Testing that hypothesis constitutes a project that scholars familiar with those countries should undertake. The same applies to the viability of a radical reading of media history for European countries other than Britain and the Netherlands. Also, more historical research could be done to unearth forgotten critical analyses of the commercial media in the Netherlands and other European countries.

Towards better journalism and democracy This book used political-economic scholarship from the US as a diagnostic tool and concluded that the disease identified in that country is also prevalent in the Netherlands. For a cure, this book also looks to the US. In the early American Republic huge federal subsidies for the delivery of newspapers through the mail had a big and positive impact on the public sphere, for they made information from a wide variety of sources available to many at a low cost. Washington recognized that it had an important role to play in creating the conditions in which American democracy could blossom (John 1995). The solution to the crisis in journalism, then, is rather obvious. The same structural problems on both sides of the Atlantic call for the same structural solutions. A well-functioning media system can only be built on top of non-commercial foundations, as critical observers in the Netherlands in the 1970s already understood. The Netherlands is a rich country and the abundant availability of highquality information on issues pertaining to the public good is generally acknowledged to be essential to the functioning of a democracy. Dutch society spends billions of euros on health care and education. These expenses are accepted by almost all as necessary and praiseworthy. The Netherlands boasts public libraries because the Dutch believe that the free flow of information is essential to a democracy. Where are the millions in public funds that should ensure an independent, high-quality news system? It will not do to just wait and see (anxious or hopeful as the case may be) how developments in the media and technology sectors play out. Although what needs to be done is obvious, the how is not. Exactly which mechanisms for infusing journalism with public funds – while always guarding against state influence on the news – are the most suitable should be decided in an open debate. As the Dutch case shows, a public broadcasting system by itself does not guarantee a news flow that makes democracy possible. Dutch scholars, policymakers and the public must reassess the importance and relevance of the state to media policy, for media systems are to a very significant extent the result of the policies that create them. It might well be that only a directive that forbids news to be produced by profit-making organizations can help guarantee a journalism that is as independent as humanly possible from the powers that be. Such a directive would not mean the end of professional journalism in the sense of the end of trained journalists getting paid for their work. But it would mean that journalists would be working for organizations that do not aim to make a profit, do not depend on advertising for revenue and ideally are run by the journalists themselves. As American journalist George Seldes has argued, true freedom of the press consists of “letting the editorial staff run the newspaper” (Christians et al. 2009: 92). How does a society pay reporters and at the same time guarantee their independence? An ideal solution to the problem does not exist, but this should not inhibit citizens from finding a workable one. Digital media are significant because they enable low distribution and production costs, which in turn increase the viability of a democratic, bottom-up media system. The internet is valuable chiefly because it provides a convenient and cheap platform on which to construct a public sphere independent from both the state and the market. The opportunity exists. But it will only be realized with the right policy measures. Trained and paid journalists might well be needed in the future too, but journalistic objectivity has its problems. The distinction between objective and advocacy journalism is untenable and

misleading. Championing an explicit point of view and providing context to the news do not exclude respect for facts. Those who are truly concerned with changing the world better respect the (relevant) facts; for the more realistic the picture of the current situation, the higher the chance that changes can be successfully implemented. Theo Van Stegeren was spot on when he said that the dichotomy between partisan and objective media can be overcome. He provided the example of the British journalist Greg Palast, who openly takes a stand on issues and is biased in the sense that he attacks injustice. But he also does extensive research and provides opportunity for parties he disagrees with to present their case (Reijnders et al. 2007: 47). Another model for what the future journalist should be is an old media journalist working for a commercial newspaper, namely Robert Fisk of The Independent. His reporting and commentary stem from an ideological perspective: that of respect for democracy and human rights. Nonetheless, Fisk respects the facts just as much as the objective reporter; perhaps even more so, for he routinely moves beyond official statements by attempting to evaluate their veracity and meaning. Some future challenges are peculiar to the Dutch media. For instance, because of the small domestic market, they are particularly susceptible to the influence of foreign news agencies like Reuters and AP and other global agenda-setting media. Also, the Dutch state has ceded much power to Brussels. It seems unlikely that Dutch politics by itself can make significant changes in the media landscape in disregard of European Union stipulations. Therefore, fundamental reform of the Dutch media system is more likely to come about as part of a pan-European effort. The present conundrum is that legislation that establishes sufficient public monies for a news system worthy of a true democracy will likely only be implemented in a true democracy. In other words, only after society’s power relations have changed fundamentally can journalism be revolutionized also. At the same time, the implementation of a true democracy likely will come about only after large segments of society have been made aware – through the media – of the human costs of a malfunctioning journalism and democracy. This intractable issue has no simple solution. Different tactics should be adopted simultaneously. Even incremental reform towards a democratic media system will increase the possibility of a fundamental change in society’s power relations, resulting in the establishment of a true democracy. And the further democratization of Dutch society will stimulate a more critical journalism.

Author’s Note This book constitutes a heavily-revised version of the dissertation I wrote while a student at the invaluable Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The overall arguments have stayed the same, but I made many changes. To mention a few of the most important ones: I incorporated passages of the original review of the contemporary debates on the Dutch media, which in the dissertation comprised a separate chapter, in the first chapter of this book. I excised another dissertation chapter and included a revision of the discussion of the state of Dutch democracy that it consisted of in the book chapter on the reception of Papandreou’s referendum proposal. I deleted dozens of pages from the original dissertation chapter on the press coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq, mainly so as to tighten the overview of the relevant background information. I updated the overview of the Dutch media landscape in chapter 4 with more recent statistics. I also edited the complete text and made many small changes. Parts of this book have already appeared elsewhere. A version of chapter 2, which examines Dutch media history, was presented at the 2013 conference of the National Communication Association (NCA) in Washington DC. Yet another version was published in Javnost-The Public (3(2013): 93-108). Chapter 3 on the 1970s political-economic perspective on the Dutch media was published in slightly revised form in the International Journal of Communication (7(2013): 722740). A version of chapter 4, which discusses the applicability of the propaganda model to the Netherlands, was published in the &I;International Journal of Communication&I2; (8(2014): 22982317). A version of chapter 5, on the coverage of the run-up to the war in Iraq, was published in the International Communication Gazette (76 2(2014): 109-127). A version of chapter 7, which deals with the commentary on the proposal to hold a Greek referendum on the euro crisis, was presented at the 2013 conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Washington DC. All parts of this book that have appeared elsewhere are reprinted with permission, when required. Books are written simultaneously in solitude and as part of an intellectual community. In hindsight, I can only consider myself lucky to have been accepted as a PhD-student by the Institute of Communications Research, as it provided me with the opportunity to connect with scholars that hold similar research interests and outlooks. First and foremost, I profited from almost daily discussions with my fellow students and friends, Rich Potter and Ian Davis. I would hazard to guess that I learned more from them than they did from me. My committee members John Nerone, Robert W. McChesney, Ann Reisner and Matt Ehrlich supported me in all kinds of ways, both professional and personal. I would also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Renmin University of China. They warmly welcomed me and made the transition into my new job as easy as it could have been, while I was also finishing up this book. Many other people assisted me. I would like to thank Teun Van Dijk, Lex Rietman, Kees Brants, Wouter Jager, Elselien Breman, Barbara Klemann, Peter Vasterman, Jan Bierhoff, Cees Hamelink, Edi Terlaak, Edward S. Herman, Marcel Broersma, Dan Schiller, Martin Hulsing, Marja Roholl, Peter Burger, Jaap Van Ginneken and Joan Hemels. Liesbeth Tjon A Meeuw, a conscientious journalist, kindly helped me whip chapters 4 and 6 into shape. Peter Claessens cast his professional eye on the whole manuscript. Nonetheless, this book still has flaws, for which only I am responsible.

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Notes [←1] Sinclair (2003: 113) praised Dutch journalists profusely because they did not crucify him publicly for getting a divorce (in the Netherlands). They ignored the private matter, which had become a public scandal in the United States. Indeed, for a long time much of Dutch journalism resisted gossip and celebrity news. That started to change in the 1970s. In the 1990s, partly due to the advent of commercial television, gossip and celebrity news rose to prominence.

[←2] The author would like to express his gratitude to the interviewees: Kees Brants, Joan Hemels, Jaap Van Ginneken, Cees Hamelink, Teun Van Dijk, Peter Vasterman, Marcel Broersma, Dan Schiller and Jan Bierhoff.

[←3] The critical nature of the book was already apparent from the title. The correct way to spell persconcentratie is not with the letter k but with the letter c. Experimenting with new ways of spelling was characteristic of parts of the political left at the time.

[←4] Other notable publications in the critical strand are: Kees Brants’s Journalistiek Ondersteboven (Journalism Upside Down, 1974); Media, Macht en Mensen (Media, Power and People, 1974) by Ben Manschot; and Gekonkel om de Kabel (Intrigue over Cable, 1974) by Jan Tromp (see following). These books were published in the series Nieuwspoortreeks by the Wetenschappelijke Uitgeverij (Scientific Publisher) in Amsterdam.

[←5] I do not mean to suggest that the change in perspective that many critical observers adopted resulted from opportunism. In other words, I do not question their motivations. Rather, I simply note that they moved toward the political center.

[←6] See extra-media.nl. Mark Deuze (2004) and Kees Brants (2011, with Katrin Voltmer) mentioned the magazine.

[←7] In May 2010, popular Dutch novelist Arnon Grunberg advised readers, ironically on the front page of de Volkskrant, to read Manufacturing Consent if they wanted to understand how journalism works. This rare mention of Manufacturing Consent in the mainstream press does not show up in the Lexis-Nexis database. The probable reason is that Grunberg is a freelancer.

[←8] During the run-up to the war, Jaap van Ginneken (2003; personal communication) wrote an article entitled The Great Deception, in which he explained and warned against the propaganda techniques employed by the US. Although he was a well-known progressive author, he could not find a major publication willing to print it. It finally appeared, after the invasion had already taken place, in a little-known magazine.

Table of Contents The Dutch Media Monopoly Contents 1.Dutch Journalism in Crisis The crisis in Dutch journalism Limits of a comparative perspective Normative perspective Debates and scholarship on the Dutch media Digital media’s impact on journalism Book’s aim and structure 2.Liberal or Radical? Rethinking Dutch Media History The historiography of the Dutch media Dutch media history: A critical look The press and the ANP before WWII The press and the ANP since the 1970s The decline of public service broadcasting The Dutch media in the 1990s Conclusion 3.The Forgotten Political Economists Political-economic critiques before the 1970s The critical perspective in the 1970s The 1980s and beyond Conclusion 4.A Dutch Propaganda Model The propaganda model Applying the propaganda model outside the US The first filter: Ownership The press The news agencies Broadcasting The second filter: Advertising The third filter: Sourcing The fourth filter: Flak The fifth filter: Pro-market ideology Research supporting a Dutch propaganda model The propaganda model ignored Conclusion 5.Following Washington’s Lead:The Press on Looming War in Iraq Historical background and literature review Methodology Study I: Does Iraq have WMDs? Results Study II: Reporting dissent Shell’s role

Study III: The reception of Powell’s speech De Telegraaf on Powell De Volkskrant on Powell NRC Handelsblad on Powell Conclusion 6.Forget the Past:The Media on the US Withdrawal from Iraq Iraq after the invasion Press coverage of the US withdrawal Methodology Casualties and refugees Background to the invasion Reasons for and consequences of the invasion US misconduct in Iraq Bush versus Saddam Public opinion TV news on the US withdrawal Conclusion 7.Euros over Citizens:The Press’s Narrow Definition of Democracy Dutch democracy in crisis Dutch journalism and democracy Methodology Against the referendum In favor of the referendum Readers’ reactions Conclusion 8.Where to Take Dutch Journalism Towards better journalism and democracy Author’s Note Bibliography Notes