By Mijke van Leersum
On the 22nd of February, Professor Luscombe’s students in the Capstone-course Comparative Media (CAP 317) got to conduct a skype-interview with Wouter Meijer, a reporter with the NOS (the Dutch public broadcast corporation) who was stationed as a foreign correspondent in Berlin from 2008 until 2014. Ever since he moved back, he has been living in Amsterdam and works at the foreign desk of the central newsroom at NOS.
News is everywhere and that’s nothing new. However, thanks to the Internet and technological developments, news can also be anywhere and even anything. People can choose exactly what they want to know, when they want to know it and via which channels they get their information. So how does the traditional media keep up? When discussing the current approach of the NOS, Meijer noted that it was important not to give the audience what they want. According to Meijer, if you would give the people what they want, the news would be nothing more than “sports, royalty and a little bit of sex before going over to the weather”. He said that the news is not like a snack bar, where a large variety is offered, the people pick whatever they want and then the snack bar will adjust their offer based on which food is most popular. Instead, news stations filter the news and create a menu of choices. Of course they will try and make it as attractive as possible for the audience but not if it compromises the quality and variety of the news. To stick with the food analogy, it used to be even more top-down. Meijer mentioned: “What my elder colleague once said, the eight o’clock news is like a brown piece of bread with very healthy cheese on it, you have to eat it once a day because it’s good for you and you never ask why”.
He also offered some careful criticism on the way the news is currently being reported. In order to determine what the audience needs to see, news agencies often look to what their peers are up to. He pointed out that a lot of what we see comes through the lens of the USA or the UK. He wondered if maybe we engaged with international news through an English-American language profile just a bit too much. In his own experience, if there was a news story regarding Germany he would often receive a call from his colleagues back home who said that they “saw something on the BBC”. This left him wondering: “Why would you look at the BBC for stories about Germany?” After all, one should never underestimate the value of primary sources.
If the news is the media equivalent of “brown bread with healthy cheese”, there is an assumption that they know what is good for the audience and will provide them with nutritious food for thought. However, like most things that are healthy and good for people, the news is often regarded with suspicion. According to Meijer, this comes down to a lack of authority. He said: “There are no authorities anymore. We [the NOS, red.] are not the big platform anymore that people watch and always believe. They can choose from all social media, from all the websites, their own world and often live in one of these bubbles, and that is a difficult position for us, and we’re really struggling with that.”
An underlying factor of this problem is that in order for a news agency to be regarded as an authority, the audience needs to trust and believe them. With an abundance of ‘fake news’-mediums and the recently coined concept of ‘alternative facts’, the trust in the media is fragile. People no longer seem to trust the news to be objective and truthful. Meijer said: “There is a big difference in this fake news category, because people don’t believe the mainstream media anymore. Now there are no big institutions anymore, there is no big centre, no common ground, no ‘this is what we all hold to be true and from there on, you can find your own opinions’. We don’t know any more what, well of course we know what fake news is because you can check it, but many people don’t check it so they have their completely own reality, which is something completely new. There is no more centre.”
If this core of truth is indeed disintegrating, is there still hope for the news? Should we all dust off our copies of 1984 or embrace that the truth is dead? According to Meijer, critical thinking and education are a good place to find solid ground. He suggested that perhaps schools should spend more time teaching media awareness. That way it will be easier for people to differentiate between facts, opinions and satire. As an audience, there are certain questions one can ask, such as: Who is making this? Who has an interest in telling this story? And most importantly: Is it credible? If a story does not make sense, don’t be afraid to fact-check or find extra information. On a more philosophical note, Meijer mused about the role of truth throughout history:
“[…] of course in the 19th century and before, nobody knew anything about the truth and everybody lived in their own small worlds. An English mile was longer than a French mile and a German mile, or the other way around. So the standardisation of this world, where we all became aware of the same facts, is a short period in history. Maybe we are drifting back to a world where everyone has their own little community with their time and standards and measures.”
All musings aside, keeping up with current affairs can be disenchanting, depressing or just down-right exhausting, so as a final note Meijer gave a reminder not too become too pessimistic. “There are a few natural diseases in journalism that have to do with the short-term nature of our business. We live off conflicts and wars, quarrels, escalation, discussions, and when things go well, we often don’t report about it.” He continued with the sobering reminder that in the long run, many things are in fact improving. In order to see these improvements, we have to turn our gaze to the long run. Catastrophes usually happen suddenly, while positive change is often gradually. It is a slower movement and that reflects itself in the way that type of news is reported. Meijer advises that in order to see news like this, it helps to look away from the TV news and instead read longer in-depth articles and reports. The news is, quite literally, in our hands. There is an incredible amount of information out there, flying at us in all forms and shapes, but it does not have to overwhelm us. We can choose what we focus on. Choose wisely.
Mijke van Leersum, Class of 2017, is a literature and philosophy major from Huizen, the Netherlands.
