Page - 106 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Leen d’Haenens | Whither Cultural Diversity on the Dutch TV Screen? 106 Parallel to the former version of the Diversity Monitor, this content analysis also looked into the ways in which public service as well as commercial TV stations in the Netherlands assume their social responsibility towards a pluralist society. Research questions were: How “virtuously” are the broadcasters portraying social reality when it comes to the visualization of age, ethnicity and gender?; What TV channels are doing a lesser or better job, and in what program genres? By means of a quantitative analysis the Diversity Monitor charted the (re)presentation of different groups, with particular focus on gender, age and ethnicity. As stated above, under the terms of the Concession Act of 2000, the Dutch public broadcasting system takes its responsibility very seriously: its mission is to address all groups of society and to (re)present them in the most balanced fashion possible. The policy with which this mission is to be carried out highlights the broadcaster’s public responsibility and goes beyond mere conformity with program regulations and financial criteria (see Bardoel, d’Haenens & Peeters, 2005). Still, the question remains to what extent the audience-oriented programming policy of the public-service system is effectively more successful than the consumer-oriented approach of the commercial stations in reflecting the diversity of Dutch society. A further question then is: Does the public system not quite succeed in achieving its goals or do the commercial stations manage to do so even without those specific guidelines? The results revealed a wide diversity of TV programs in the Netherlands, but diversity as such is no guarantee of a balanced (re)presentation of society at large. The fact is that public and commercial stations make a selection of the material they show their audiences, and this results in a kind of sub-optimal diversity. Moreover, audience groups too tend to make their own selections, so that the diversity on offer is effectively reduced even further. Hence, in light of the combined selection mechanisms of the broadcaster and the public, what the viewer eventually gets is at the most a mirror of his or her own group. On first viewing the results of our research, neither public nor commercial television in the Netherlands appeared to be particularly representative of Dutch society. Women, children, senior citizens and ethnic minorities are, generally speaking, underrepresented. However, finding out if Dutch television or its public channels and commercial channels create a balanced image of different groups is less simple than it might appear to be. Things are fairly simple as far as the men/women ratio is concerned: Men have a clear majority, whoever the broadcaster and whatever the channel or genre, although Net5 is definitely non-chauvinist and Nederland 2 mainly puts men on screen (e.g. in sports programs). The distribution on the basis of ethnic origin shows the most marked distortion of reality. Eight out of ten persons on Dutch