The
official version of Dutch media history maintains that the partisan journalism
which was prevalent until the 1970s fell far short, because it was intimately
tied to political parties. In the 1970s, journalism professionalized and since
then it has done more or less what it is supposed to do.
But
this is a very partial account. Indeed, the partisan media hardly practiced
journalism as we like to see it done: acting as the watchdog of democracy. But
when journalism shrugged off its political ties, the market filled the vacuum,
and far from the market functioning as an ‘engine of freedom,’ to use British
scholar James Curran’s words - the market in reality amounted to yet another
‘system of control,’ to cite Curran once again.
The
commercial media’s primary task is not to provide the population with relevant,
independently-gathered information. Their primary task is to deliver readers,
viewers and listeners to advertisers. As a consequence, the media in the
Netherlands are owned by rich corporations and persons who have a stake in
maintaining friendly ties with other corporations and also the government, for
access to powerful political sources needs to be kept at all costs.
No
wonder that the journalistic product reflects the interests of elites. The
media are the elite, also in the Netherlands, its reputation of a progressive
country regarding ‘cultural’ issues like abortion and the death penalty
notwithstanding. Dutch journalism thus remains far from independent, at least,
if we take Jurgen Habermas’ definition seriously, whereby a public sphere ‘can
only approach autonomy if it is independent from both the state and commercial
interests’.