Page - 103 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives
Image of the Page - 103 -
Text of the Page - 103 -
Leen d’Haenens | Whither Cultural Diversity on the Dutch TV Screen?
103
being: MTNL (multicultural television in the four largest cities), FunX
(metropolitan, multicultural radio station for youths) and Mixed Media
(intermediary for traineeships for immigrant journalists). It appeared that on a
national level, projects were being initiated in radio, television, and the press
leading to more ethnic groups recognizing themselves in the media.
Visions of broadcasting towards ethnic minorities have undergone major
changes in the Netherlands. In the 1950s and 1960s programs were aimed at
target groups with educational and informative content about the home
country and in the ‘own’ language. Paspoort (Passport) was such a service
program supplying news and information in an effort to foster successful
integration. Until the 1980s these target audience programs predominated on
radio and television. But after realizing that the integration issue was not all
that successful, new journalistic programs were produced to onesidedly remedy
this failure, by informing ethnic groups in Dutch about the Netherlands, while
emphasizing at times their intrinsicalities and their “exoticisms” in comparison
with Dutch society and the Dutch: Meer op zondag (More on Sunday) was an
example. The 1990s, the decade of the emergence of commercial channels,
introduced a smarter portrayal of ethnic minority groups on television, albeit
as part of foreign (read US) programs. The NPS was set up in 1995 in order to
provide more depth and quality, and get rid of the target audience television
once and for all. As of the mid-1990s a crosscultural approach was adopted
instead, and black actors and presenters became gradually more visible on the
TV screen in programs such as Comedy factory, Dunya and Desie, Bradaz, Urbania,
and children’s programs with a multicultural angle2. Also in the informative
field, different topics such as dating, sexuality, religion, cultural differences,
relationships with partners of different origins were brought to the fore. After
9/11 and in the aftermath of the murders of Pim Fortuyn (2002) and Theo van
Gogh (2004), the multicultural society’s reality has become more grim, which
resulted in NPS programs emphasizing the political side of the multicultural
society, for instance in programs such as De meiden van Halal (The Halal Girls).
In short, nowadays there seems to be more variety in the portraits of ethnic
minorities shown on Dutch television. On the one hand there is the soft,
unproblematic approach of Urbania, also adopted in the Europe-wide program
Cityfolk, staging three city dwellers one of whom is of ethnic minority
2 Comedy factory is a TV show with Surinamese presenter Raymann staging
national and international stand-up comedians; Dunya & Desie evolves around a
Moroccan and a Dutch 15 year-old living in Amsterdam and discussing teenage
problems; Bradaz is a comedy about two Surinamese brothers running a music
shop; Urbania shows portraits of people living in the multicultural city of
Amsterdam.
Media – Migration – Integration
European and North American Perspectives
- Title
- Media – Migration – Integration
- Subtitle
- European and North American Perspectives
- Authors
- Rainer Geissler
- Horst Pöttker
- Publisher
- transcript Verlag
- Date
- 2009
- Language
- English
- License
- CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
- ISBN
- 978-3-8376-1032-1
- Size
- 15.0 x 22.4 cm
- Pages
- 250
- Keywords
- Integration, Media, Migration, Europe, North America, Sociology of Media, Sociology
- Category
- Medien