Page - 108 - in Media – Migration – Integration - European and North American Perspectives

Leen d’Haenens | Whither Cultural Diversity on the Dutch TV Screen? 108 women in the items dealt with). When it comes to fiction programs, however, the amount of female viewers does not correlate significantly with the percentage of female actors. Additionally, young audiences show a tendency to watch young presenters and youngsters in non-fiction programs, which is clearly not the case for seniors. Moreover, while young people do not seem to watch seniors (neither in fiction nor in non-fiction), seniors do watch their own age group both in fiction and non-fiction. In general, seniors are relatively underrepresented in public television fiction programs and evidently in competition with numerous younger actors, except for a few striking examples in homemade fiction programs attracting a lot of viewers. Above are a few indications illustrating that diversity in programming does not automatically lead towards diversity of audience groups. Television is therefore not a mirror of society (partly due to the viewer’s choice). It may be true that Dutch viewers make a varied selection of programs and zap, for example, from news to entertainment and drama, but that does not mean that in doing so they come face to face with diverse social groups. If diversity on television is linked to a few ratings which are available, what we find is that the preference of the public is for programs with and about their own group: young people select (foreign) programs in which adolescents and young adults are the key figures, and they do not go for programs featuring over-50s. One more example: men tend to zap away from programs in which women are well represented. Nevertheless, public channels tend to be more “coloured” than their commercial counterparts, but we find this feature particularly in programs staging many other (white) persons or in programs attracting a relatively low number of viewers as well as in children’s programs. 4.2 Interviewing the Program Makers: What Remedies Are There? As both Monitors of Diversity were mere quantitative content analyses that revealed a difference between public and commercial channels, homemade and foreign productions, as well as among program genres, it was deemed interesting to look beyond the program as a mere result and pay particular attention to the production process of Dutch homemade fiction. Therefore, the aim was to look behind the scenes, asking program makers working for public and commercial broadcasters about the choices they tend to make when visualizing diversity on the television screen, as well as the rationales behind