mon 02 mar 2009 09:00:30 — witte de withstraat
pvv doing just great
periodically here in nederland, a guy named maurice de hond conducts an opinion poll. the most recent one, released sunday, says that if elections were held now, geert wilders' party PVV would be the biggest winner -- 27 seats in parliament.
earlier i was saying that all the negative publicity would do wilders good, but i didn't realize how much good. in january a court in amsterdam said wilders should be prosecuted for his anti-islamic expressions. then in february he was denied admission to the UK. both these things seem to have made him quite a bit more popular than before, to the extent that his would now be the biggest party.
and yet oddly enough, i don't think i personally know anybody who likes wilders. how does that work?
according to the poll, of the people who said they would vote for wilders today, the favorite newspaper was de telegraaf and favorite broadcast union was TROS.
so what is TROS, you might ask. if you were a fairly ignorant foreigner like me. turns out it just stands for "television and radio broadcaast foundation", which doesn't tell you much does it. i went to look it up in wikipedia, wondering if this public broadcast union had any some specific political standpoint.
if i understand correctly, they started in 1964, for the sole purpose of giving the people what they wanted: more shallow american TV series. later the more traditional (religious and political) public broadcasting organizations started to follow suit, just to compete with TROS. back then people called this phenomenon vertrossing. so while TROS sometimes appears politically right-leaning, i guess its real mandate is just to be popular.
now again it's funny how my mind makes these dubious connections. the other night i was blithely watching the (TROS produced) news show een vandaag without any prejudice, just cuz there was some story i was interested in. but now i know that members of TROS have something in common with readers of de telegraaf (newspaper that never lived down its reputation for having collaborated with the nazis during the occupation). and from now on if i tune in to een vandaag i will feel like i'm hanging with telegraaf readers who vote for geert wilders.