Page - 103 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

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.