The Media Meltdown, the Dutch Julian Assange, Smoking Racists, Trust and Truth

Hans Vogel casts A Critical Eye on the Evolving Media Landscape, contrasting the Decline of Traditional News Papers with the Rise of Alternative News Outlets in The Netherlands, Underscoring A Significant Shift in the Dis Semination and Consumption of Information

A recent article here elaborated on the existential crisis that has been affecting the US media with mounting vehemence. However, it is not just the US media that are going through A crisis. The European media are affected by the same phenomena. This can be clearly observed by focusing on The Netherlands.

Once upon a time, just like the US media landscape, the Dutch one was diverse and varied. We are talking here about the 1980‘s. Such was the case all over Western Europe, where one could find practically the entire political spectrum represented on news stands. Only far right publications were hard to find, for the simple reason that these were few and far between. But those of what was considered to be the far left were easily available. Not only L’Humanité and L‘Unità, organs of, respectively, the French and Italian Communist Parties, but the Dutch Communist Party daily De Waarheid, The Truth, as well. Even the Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda could be bought in The Netherlands, and on A daily basis.

Now that the glorious days of the printed daily newspaper are over, of course no Russian dailies can be bought anywhere in The Netherlands nor elsewhere in the European Union. Moreover, the unelected EU Commission has decreed that, in order to protect European citizens from “Hate Speech,” “Dis Information” and “Fake News,” they can not even have access to Russian news outlets on their computers, tablets and cell phones. Yes, it’s called censorship! It has returned to Western Europe and it is alive and kicking, just as in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic. Compared to the EU today, the 1980’s seem an idyllic era of almost unfettered freedom of speech.

In those years, it was still possible for Dutch writer Gerrit Komrij to publish Lof der Simpelheid, In Praise of Simplicity, 1988, in which one chapter was called “Plea in Favor of the Smoking Racist.” Komrij savagely attacked the concept of political correctness and its defenders and practitioners, arguing that freedom of speech was sacred and necessary for any healthy society. In those days, there was still humor and there were no taboo subjects. Indeed, few things are potentially so funny and so ideal as the butt of jokes as taboos. No longer. True humor has been on the retreat ever since the 1990’s and today can only still be found in the hidden corners of the internet or in the form of whispered jokes among old and trusted friends.

By the end of the 1990‘s, as the internet was beginning to grow and develop, newspapers began to get some competition from websites. At the rate that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the legacy media became increasingly politically correct, these alternative media started to develop.

Among the first of these in the Netherlands was Kleintje Muurkrant, Junior Wall Newspaper, founded in 1998, as an extension of A regional anarchist squatter’s publication, Kleintje soon became the go to source for alternative news and info on the true functioning of Dutch state, business and society. Operating in the best tradition of muckraking journalism, Kleintje showed it to be a sleazy environment rife with corruption, where the elites, including the Dutch royal family, are intimately connected with the underworld. Well hidden from the public view, of course.

In 2000, Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh, reportedly assassinated by the Dutch Secret Service in 2004, founded another website dedicated to the uncovering of corruption in its varied forms, De Gezonde Roker, The Healthy Smoker. In 2004 journalist Micha Kat, belonging to the small group of van Gogh’s friends and associates, published A book on the decay of the newspaper he had been working for, NRC Handelsblad, considered to be the Dutch quality newspaper, the “Paper of Record.” In A pun on the paper’s motto of Lux et Libertas, Light and Liberty, the book carried the title Lux, Libertas en Leugens, Light, Liberty and Lies,, and provided A wealth of juicy and embarrassing details on the extensive corruption of the paper, its professional standards and of the private lives of its journalists. As such, in A sense it pre figured the book by German journalist Udo Ulfkotte, Gekaufte Journalisten, or Bought Journalists, 2014. Naturally, we knew all along that the news paper world was riddled with corruption, since Guy de Maupassant published Bel Ami in 1885.

Other new alternative outlets from the early years include the news blog GeenStijl, 2003, still alive and enjoying A broad popularity. This is understandable, because it has gone politically MainStream, faithfully reflecting and echoing Dutch state propaganda, albeit in A satirical garb.

After 2004, Micha Kat, the “Dutch Julian Assange,” founded his own channel, Klokkenluider Online, Whistleblower Online, which soon became the most important and most influential dissident outlet in The Netherlands. As A result and because of his activist tendencies, Kat would stand outside government buildings, call out mis deeds and ask for explanations, through A megaphone, Kat was repeatedly arrested. A few years ago, he was arrested in Northern Ireland, extradited to The Netherlands and thrown in jail after A conviction on the basis of trumped up charges. On February 22, 2024, his two year prison term was scheduled to end. However, Dutch justice being what it is, one never knows.

Other noteworthy alternative and dissident media from that period include Anarchiel and the anti monarchist and slightly high brow but nonetheless influential website Pro Republica, both no longer active. There was also Argus Oog, Argus Eye, whose pioneering podcasts, Argus Oog Radio, were quite influential and remarkable.