Securitizing cultural diversity: Dutch public broadcasting in post-multicultural and de-pillarized times

Introduction

In 2008, the then Dutch minister for education, culture and science, Ronald Plasterk (2008), sent a letter to parliament to outline his new vision on the role of public media policy in ‘stimulating the balanced representation of different groups of society in mainstream media and [in] strengthening the specific provision for minorities’ (p. 1). In the letter, Plasterk substituted the term ‘Media and Minorities’ of the end of the 1990s with ‘Media and Diversity’, a term he found better attuned to Dutch society and integration policy in 2008. He explained,

We live in a diverse and colorful society, in more than one way. Without wanting to undermine the legitimized specific attention for (often ethnic) minorities in the media, the ultimate concern should be diversity in what media offer […] in which all groups of our society must be able to recognize themselves and in which they can participate. (Plasterk, 2008: 2, emphasis in original)

Plasterk’s letter did not only propose a shift from ‘minorities’ to ‘diversity’ in media policy. It also justified a displacement of the public media’s representational ‘concern’ from ethnic minorities to all – including majority – groups in society. Significantly, then, Plasterk underscored that special efforts to secure diversity were still needed, but that the main target of these efforts was not (or at least not only) minority audiences any more. This article critically examines this redefinition of public broadcasting’s relation to diversity and its implications for how the public broadcaster conceives and relates to its audience.

While significant and novel, the shift of 2008 was not the first effort to redefine diversity in Dutch public service broadcasting. In fact, Plasterk’s letter is based on an expert assessment of public media diversity policy, which documents a move from ‘the margins to the mainstream’ in public broadcasting’s diversity efforts between 1999 and 2008 (Leurdijk, 2008). The ‘margins’ approach of the 1980s and early 1990s consisted mainly of the production of group-targeted programmes for the different immigrant communities and in their own languages. The ‘mainstreaming’ of diversity since the late 1990s aimed instead at the provision of Dutch-language programmes that could bring together minority and mainstream audiences (Leurdijk, 2004, 2008). The policy move towards mainstreaming developed – in the Netherlands, like in other countries – as a response to the ‘recited truth’ of multiculturalism’s failure (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 11, 13). Thus, mainstreaming became the norm for addressing diversity after (the death of) multiculturalism. It was meant to reinforce a dominant model of national belonging and undermine group differences in general (Awad and Roth, 2011; for other European countries, see Awad, 2008; Horsti, 2008; Horsti and Hultén, 2011; Malik, 2013; Titley, 2012).

However, Plasterk’s call for the public service broadcaster to address cultural differences, we argue, moves beyond mainstreaming. The letter sets the stage, and reflects the conditions, for a media policy shift in a different, and to some extent contradictory, direction. Plasterk refers to ‘all groups’, but does not suggest they should all be placed together. His emphasis on diversity, instead, points to a revalorization of cultural difference. Unlike mainstreaming efforts, Plasterk’s call is to take diversity seriously. As we will see in the analysis that follows, the renewed engagement with diversity is particularly visible in how the public service broadcaster, Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO), reflects on its remit and value, in how NPO models its audiences and in how it extends some of its key diversity programming with theme nights from 2008 onwards.

Our analysis of these discourse types shows the paradoxical nature of NPO’s renewed focus on diversity. In fact, we find that NPO’s discourse constructs an exclusionary version of cultural diversity as vital to its public remit. It is what we term securitization of cultural diversity, which is based on the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate – safe and risky – group differences. This exclusionary mechanism, we assert, is legitimized by NPO strategically invoking pluriformity, a term that typically signifies traditional cultural difference in Dutch society prior to the arrival of a relatively large number of migrants from outside Europe in the 1960s and which originally justified NPO’s complex organizational structure.

A ‘total football’ strategy for public broadcasting

Plasterk’s guidelines for public service media are based on a diagnosis of the state of Dutch society and a vision for its future that, in many ways, resembles that of other European countries and of the European Union (EU) more generally (e.g. Titley et al., 2014). However, Plasterk’s letter is also significantly informed by a more specific national social history of social difference and pillarization as well as a tradition of pluriformity. In brief, pillarization refers to the social ‘pillars’ – Catholic, protestant, socialist and liberal – that structured Dutch society throughout most of the 20th century. Pluriformity, in turn, refers to the institutionalization of pillar-based differences, through separate schools, media and other civic organizations. It explains why public broadcasting was originally structured in four broadcasters: the Protestant Nederlandse Christelijke Radio Vereniging (NCRV), Catholic Katholieke Radio Omroep (KRO), social-democrat Vereniging Arbeiders Radio Amateurs (VARA) and the so-called generalist (but actually liberal) Algemene Vereniging Radio Omroep (AVRO), each of which was initially given an equal percentage of broadcasting time. The resulting system ‘not only reported the divisions in society, but also gave them organizational expression and legitimized them’ (Van der Eijk, 2000: 306).

Paradoxically, the same broadcasting system that emerged as ‘the most completely pillarized sector of Dutch society’ ended up being a key factor in its depillarization towards the 1960s (Van der Eijk, 2000: 306). Different mechanisms helped undermine audiences’ pillarized convictions. First, since broadcasters shared common radio and television channels and a limited broadcasting time, Dutch people became exposed to the world-views of other pillars in ways in which they had not been exposed before. Second, broadcasters partly relied on content they had not produced. This also exposed their constituents to alternative perspectives. Moreover, new technologies allowed for ‘escapism’ (Van der Eijk, 2000) by giving Dutch audiences access to broadcasting from pirate radio and television. These alternative broadcasters were eventually institutionalized in a dual – commercial and public – broadcasting system.

Thus, together with other social processes of ‘emancipation, secularization, individualization, democratization’ (Dekker and Ester, 1996: 338), public broadcasting eroded the very same pillars on which it had been built. Both depillarization and the end of the public broadcaster’s monopoly in the face of a growing number of competitors have subsequently placed NPO’s remit, nature and funding model under recurring political scrutiny and public debate (Bardoel, 2003). The legitimacy challenge which NPO faced in 2008 and continues facing today is extraordinarily complex. Both the widespread neoliberal logic of requiring the measurable value of all public services and the prevalent anti-elitist and anti-multiculturalist sentiments in Dutch society (Awad and Engelbert, 2014) find in the (partially) publicly funded broadcaster, with its tasked responsibility for diversity and institutional grounding in difference, the epitome of all suspicion.

NPO has appropriated this near-impossible hurdle into a resource that asserts the broadcaster’s contested legitimacy. That is, with special emphasis since 2008, the broadcaster pro-actively mitigates negative connotations of pluriformity as the bureaucratic reminder of archaic, pillarized times by, in its place, systematically postulating ideological pluriformity as the means to foster social cohesion and secure recognition and representation of all – legitimate – convictions.

While it is possible to find earlier traces of this return to pluriformity, it was in 2008 – just one month before Plasterk’s letter – that NPO’s new chairman, Henk Hagoort, provided the first explicit articulation of what pluriformity should look like in a de-pillarized context. Hagoort was cited in the news for his harsh criticism of his own organization. He specifically referred to how current events and news programmes were excluding an important part of the population: the growing number of people who support the anti-establishment and, particularly, the anti-elitist politics proposed by populist parties and politicians, most notably Geert Wilders, and consequently adopted by most mainstream parliamentary parties (Maas, 2008). Journalism in public broadcasting needed to move away from the ‘purple’ approaches of the 1990s, Hagoort said, referring to the secular centre-left coalition (i.e. ‘purple’) that governed the country between 1994 and 2002. He relied on a different metaphor, that of the internationally praised total football strategy of the Dutch national team, to explain how journalism should be: it had to avoid clustering strategies and, instead, cover the whole field. Like good Dutch football, then, good Dutch public broadcasting journalism had to reach all ‘wingers’. The challenge, in Hagoort’s view, was a good fit for this country: ‘The Netherlands has always been good at finding its wingers’, he said (Maas, 2008).

To rely on wingers may be more or less uncontroversial in football, but in television, this strategy defies the logic of mainstreaming, understood as bringing everyone together. Specifically, with respect to news programmes, covering all corners of the field also challenges the principles of objectivity and neutrality, which in the Netherlands, like in other countries, are entrenched in the journalistic culture (Vos, 2002). In this sense, Hagoort could be read – at least initially – as agreeing with critical perspectives in journalism studies, which consistently blame objectivity for homogenizing news production and keeping it tuned with the status quo (e.g. Cottle, 1998; Wilson, 1991). As Awad (2011) has explained, to the extent that diversity efforts are ‘filtered by the norms of professional [objective] newsmaking’, journalism remains acultural and exclusionary (p. 258).

Hagoort’s plan to make the public broadcaster play a winger strategy was indeed meant to counter the monopoly of neutral or objective journalism by offering an ideologically diverse spectrum of opinions (Maas, 2008). However, by design, the diversity of this debate was constrained by a reinforced notion of pluriformity. At the same time as it spread its wingers throughout the field, NPO redrew the field’s boundaries to include certain subject positions and ideological perspectives and exclude others. This is what we call the securitization of cultural diversity. It implies both the protection of some differences and the protection from others. By examining the specific cultural and strategic aptness of this logic for the NPO since 2008, we show the extent to which Hagoort’s proposal in fact weakens and undermines possibilities for the public service broadcaster to be truly inclusive.

Pluriformity at work

Pluriformity, as explained above, is a legacy of the broadcaster’s pillarized origins. It is now being used to push the broadcaster outside an allegedly safe centre and broaden its scope to also reach right-wing audiences. In this way, pluriformity has enabled the public broadcaster to draw on the hegemonic idea of ‘post-multiculturalism’ (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 11, 13). Within this logic, signifiers like ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’ can – or, according to this rationality, actually should – be taken out of the realm of emancipatory or affirmative action towards ethnic minorities. After all, the latter have ‘proven’ their counter-productiveness in fostering social cohesion and national unity (e.g. Scheffer, 2000; Sniderman and Hagendoorn, 2007). Hagoort’s call for ideological pluriformity, in sum, resonates with populist demands for an approach to difference and diversity that includes and represents the hitherto excluded and non-represented majority voice(s) in Dutch society.

NPO was offered a tangible opportunity to showcase its welcoming and accommodating – pluriformity-based – approach to the ‘previously marginalized’ in 2009. In November 2009, Minister Plasterk opened the public service broadcasting spectrum to two new broadcasting organizations – PowNed and Wakker Nederland (WNL) – which were both affiliated with the Telegraaf Media Group, the owner of Telegraaf, a tabloid broadsheet newspaper that Hagoort himself described as the newspaper of Wilders’ voters (Maas, 2008). Given that the two new organizations met the legal criteria, including having raised the required 50,000 members each, they were entitled to air-time on both public service television and radio. In this way, the NPO – as the administrative organization responsible for scheduling and securing the profiles of the different television and radio channels – was given the vital symbolic opportunity to explain how these two new organizations would ‘fit’ in the existing spectrum.

Pluriformity’s suitability to align diversity with post-multiculturalism to secure a space for majority groups and – above all – to underscore the uniqueness and value of NPO is clear in Hagoort’s addendum to the 2010–2011 television season. Hagoort (2010) announced the ‘new style’ with which NPO would counter the growing ‘disunion and polarization’ in the Netherlands. He explained,

The unique Dutch broadcasting establishment with broadcasting associations and task organizations guarantees that the public broadcasting can offer quality and pluriformity. With the colorfulness of its programmes, in which as many Dutch people as possible recognize themselves, the public broadcaster is present always & everywhere; it is of & for everyone. (Hagoort, 2010)

The use of the word ‘colorfulness’ to refer to programming and convictions, rather than people, is in itself indicative of the reconfiguration of diversity as signifying ideological pluriformity. Moreover, Hagoort’s words illustrate how the discourse of promoting diversity – meant here as covering the whole political spectrum in the Netherlands – can at once assert the public value of NPO, mitigate accusations of being elitist and left-wing and enable NPO to continue using pluriformity as its raison d’être. NPO has thus been able to extract from hostile discourses to public broadcasting and fundamental threats to ethnic diversity and multiculturalism a discursive tactic to reconcile pluriformity, public value and national cohesion.

Imagining and modelling pluriform audiences

The semantic plasticity of diversity is crucial to the very possibility of public broadcasting and diversity in a context of post-multiculturalism (Lentin, 2008; Lentin and Titley, 2011; Warmington, 2009) and, in the case of the Netherlands, depillarization. It enables NPO to claim a commitment with ideological differences, while privileging certain convictions – notably those along traditional Dutch (White) mainstream identities – over others. Further evidence of this is found in NPO’s ‘Lifestyle Groups’ (NPO, 2010b). This audience segmentation method and its resulting categories offer a clear operationalization and visualization of the broadcaster’s pluriform (and thus entitled) audiences.

In NPO’s (2010b) own words, the Lifestyle Groups are meant to replace ‘traditional […] segmentations of target audiences in media research that are primarily based on demographic variables, such as age, education, sex and socio-economic position’ (p. 3). However, the method has important precedents both outside and inside the Netherlands. It is informed, first, by the boom in psycho-graphic and geo-demographic segmentation strategies used in institutional audience research to match target consumers with media audiences (Maxwell, 2000: 153). Second, lifestyle-based categorizations are key to the trade-marked and internationally renowned ‘Mentality’ formula developed in 1997 by Motivaction. The Motivaction model, in turn, has inspired various national media consumption surveys in the Netherlands for more than a decade. Like the ‘Mentality’ formula, NPO’s Lifestyle Groups combine ‘values and lifestyle research’ (Motivaction, n.d.) and provide – narrated and visualized – profile descriptions of audience types.

What is noteworthy about NPO’s Lifestyle Groups is that they constitute an additional effort to improve its understanding of the audience. As NPO (2007) itself had admitted earlier, given audience characterizations went as far as ‘left-right [politics]’, they paid insufficient attention to ‘the degree of pluriformity along other axes, such as elitist-folk, Randstad-province, libertarian – conservative, etc.’ (p. 10). What the public broadcaster needed, then, was to develop its own, more nuanced instrument to imagine the audience. It did so through narrated descriptions that include ‘demographic details’, ‘opinions and values’, ‘interests and leisure activities’, ‘media needs’ (information, activation, entertainment, relaxation) and ‘media behaviour’ (medium type), as well as favourite brands, sports and cultural products. As such, NPO’s Lifestyle Groups suggest a more thorough engagement with social differences in the Netherlands. However, closer attention, first, to the assumptions of this approach to audience segmentation and, second, to the categories it constructs reveals new kinds of exclusion.

Given its conformity to contemporary typologies used in institutional audience research, the Lifestyle approach reinforces the practice of constructing individual audience members as, and reducing them to, consuming collectives (Ang, 1991). As the Lifestyle Groups have now also been adopted for profiling the experiences and preferences of magazine readers, television viewers, radio listeners and online users in the national Media Standard Survey (MSS), the cultural aptness of thinking about media audiences in terms of their probability to display particular lifestyles and consumption patterns is further warranted (Maxwell, 2000).

The very practice of constructing commercial audiences for public and non-public media is in itself already problematic, particularly for ethnic audiences. Awad (2013) shows how practices like ethno-marketing and other methods that consider ethnic minorities for their ‘consuming power’ in fact force them to ‘adjust […] to a normalized media consumption’ (p. 179). Assuming consumption or economic utility as both condition and possibility for commonality is thus highly ideological. On the one hand, it de-politicizes the significance of cultural difference, while, on the other hand, it constructs as deviant those who do not conform to this blueprint for (social) cohesion. Practices like ethno-marketing thus imply that cultural differences do not negatively matter as long as ethnic audiences display the kind of behaviour and preferences that similarly define majority audiences. As we will see below, NPO’s Lifestyle Groups take this integrationist logic a step further and reveal its assimilationist proposition.

Eight lifestyles, eight ways of being Dutch

According to NPO, there are eight different lifestyles for the audience: ‘Critical Meaning-Seekers’, ‘Carefree Trends-Conscious’, ‘Pragmatic Family People’, ‘Caring Multi-Taskers’, ‘Young Connectors’, ‘Traditional Country-Siders’, ‘Involved Believers’ and ‘Busy Commuters’. This categorization derives from an initial clustering based on traditional audience segmentation variables – age, education, gender and disposable income – which are then correlated with more nuanced distinctions about values, opinions, interests, leisure activities, media use and consumption preferences. In no way does the approach account for racial and ethnic differences. Thus, the prototype pictures of the Lifestyles brochure (NPO, 2010b) show four women and four men, all of them ostensibly White (so-called autochthonous). The one non-White character included in the brochure is part of the background – arguably a friend – of the ‘Young Connector’.

NPO (2010a) describes the eight audience lifestyles as ‘a model of Dutch society’ (p. 128). ‘Dutchness’, then, implies whiteness. Moreover, it is a non-committal continuum or what Van Reekum (2012) terms a ‘thin identity’ (p. 586). NPO’s segmentation based on lifestyle suggests that being Dutch is the product of people flexibly – depending on their changing demographics and life-course – defining themselves through the nature of their conviction (e.g. ‘free’, ‘no-nonsense’, ‘religious Netherlands’, ‘traditionally Dutch’) and the resonance of their life mottos with commonly accepted public moralities (e.g. ‘liberal’, ‘emancipated’, ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘compassionate’). The lifestyle model subsequently conceives of media preferences, leisure activities, values and patterns in consumption as configurations of the interaction between these two axes of conviction and morality.

This new ‘model’ of audience segmentation thus clearly bears the traces of pillarization’s discursive practice to ‘refrain[ing] from developing a hegemonic public morality to which everyone subscribes and submits’ (Van Reekum, 2012: 585). Yet, warranting Van Reekum’s (2012) diagnosis of the paradox in the discursive enactment of Dutch pluralism, this performance of openness and public diversity is premised on ethnic and racial exclusion. Furthermore, none of the lifestyle members’ ‘defining features’ – be it their demographics, opinions, interests or their media needs and behaviour – represent or enable diversity beyond the commonly accepted and peacefully coexisting differences in conviction and morality.

NPO’s Lifestyle Groups – with each lifestyle group accounting for a percentage of the Dutch population – thus render race and ethnicity to be invisible (and, more importantly, irrelevant) and render non-hegemonic convictions and moralities to be deviant in Dutch society. As discussed before, audience segmentation practices are capable of upholding universalist ideas of cultural commonality through, for example, consumption (Awad, 2013). And, indeed, the segmentation through lifestyle proposed by the NPO warrants the validity of this idea. Moreover, it particularly reveals the assimilationist premise of this idea. According to the Lifestyle Groups, ethnic audiences only ‘count’ as part of the Dutch population if they can define themselves through the same fluid and non-structural convictions and moralities that are ‘orientated around whiteness’ (Ahmed, 2007: 606). They are the convictions and moralities deemed suitable for White, mainstream audiences to connect their experiences of social life and their media needs.

The mediated politics of migration and risk

As argued above, in order to adhere to Plasterk’s call and to assert its public value, the public broadcaster needs to be seen to be accommodating difference, yet rejecting representative practices that aim at acknowledging or giving a voice to the structural experiences of – ethnic and racial – difference in contemporary Dutch society. The resulting hierarchy of differences in Dutch public broadcasting is particularly visible in NPO’s current treatment of cultural diversity through its programming. The examples we provide here correspond to NPO’s novel approach to address diversity through special theme nights. Theme nights in Dutch public broadcasting overrule the usual schedule of one of the three public channels in order to dedicate prime-time hours of programming to a topic deemed particularly relevant by NPO. Typically, but not always, the broadcasting organization responsible for a theme night is task broadcaster NTR (the acronym for the merger of task broadcasters NPS, Teleac and RVU). Unlike membership-based broadcasting organizations, task broadcasters have a specific programming task – in the case of NTR, this task is related to culture, diversity and education – and must perform it in unbiased ways.

The first example is a formula used first in 2007 and later in 2010, a programme called Bimbos and Burkas (Bimbo’s en Boerka’s) and produced by NTR. The programme was presented by the public broadcaster’s ‘star’, Jeroen Pauw – a White, male, prime-time presenter, who is known for his provocative and aggressive interview style – and Esmaa, Jihad and Hajar Alariachi, three Muslim sisters with Moroccan parents, who had previously hosted their own show on NTR, The Halal Girls (De Meiden van Halal). These young women, who are known for their strict practising of Islam, and Pauw discussed a range of ‘difficult issues symptomatic of the changing climate in the Netherlands’, particularly related to anger and (the end of) tolerance (NTR, 2010).

In 2011, the same Jeroen Pauw led Pauw in Culemborg, a staged town meeting in a television studio with representatives of the Moroccan-Dutch and Moluccan-Dutch community in Culemborg. During New Year’s Eve of 2009, members from the two communities in this town had clashed. The programme, modelled on the 2003 US Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) production, Two Towns of Jasper, set out to let community members themselves resolve the ‘multicultural battle’ (NTR, 2011). Yet, with Pauw moderating the meeting, the format ensured that any reference to structural inequalities – like poverty, social exclusion and lack of opportunities in the labour market – could be channelled into a difference in lifestyle and, particularly, into different expectations about community life. In 2012, the programme was awarded the Proud to Present Award in the category, ‘Intercultural Programming and Diversity’ from the European Broadcasting Union at the Eurovision TV Summit in Copenhagen.

The discursive practice of transforming potentially risky structural features of ethnic minorities and migrants into comfortable and recognizable lifestyles is quintessentially captured in the 2011 AVRO programme, Sooo Muslim (Zooo Moslim). The quiz was part of a series in which people could similarly be tested on how ‘Conservative’ or ‘Thirty-Something’ they are. Sooo Muslim included a studio audience and a panel consisting of White, non-Muslim celebrities. They all participated in a ‘Muslim test in which themes like religion, integration, identity and lifestyle’ enabled participants to see where and how their own opinions, convictions and moralities overlapped with those of Islam (AVRO, 2011). While the programme may be applauded for perhaps trying to educate the majority population in the Netherlands on Islam, its very format reinforces the securitization of Islam. That is, the difference between Muslims and non-Muslims is to be assessed by non-Muslims, who find that, when reduced to a series of performative convictions, Islam may in fact be compatible with mainstream lifestyles and culture.

Overall, the three theme-night diversity programmes mentioned above shared the diagnosis of ethnic diversity as a source of conflict and the prescription of lifestyle solutions to reconcile positions without addressing structural inequalities. Instead, the programmes arguably confirmed to White audiences that the differences that cause problems are not theirs, that they are tolerant and willing to engage in uncomfortable dialogues (even if not to change their mind), that they can be a little bit Muslim and that they can teach minority groups how to coexist in civilized ways.

That is not to say that diversity programming and policies that were most prevalent prior to 2008 – and mainstreaming strategies in particular – did not already adhere to the neoliberal production mode of de-politicizing race and ethnicity. Our point, instead, is that, today, this is done differently and with different implications. Compare the theme nights described above, for example, with Raymann is Late (Raymann is Laat), probably the most emblematic programme aimed at mainstreaming diversity since 2001. This late-night talk show, conducted by Raymann, a famous comedian born in Suriname, treats diversity not as a problem, but as ‘the Pandora’s box of creativity’; it ‘plays’ with prejudices against the Surinamese-Dutch, but always underscoring the ‘funny side of diversity’ (Jennekens, 2010: 18). Like mainstreaming approaches, in general, this show incorporates diversity in apolitical terms to bring together and entertain the wider audience (Awad and Engelbert, 2014).

What is specific about NPO’s logic of securitizing diversity, however, is its open acknowledgement of ethnic diversity as a problem and, thus, its distinction between good and bad diversity, diversity that can be political and diversity that should not. While the mainstreaming and the securitizing regimes coexist in NPO’s programming today, the latter has become particularly visible in the last few years – that is, diversity programming that increasingly establishes and polices boundaries between, on the one hand, accepted and safe difference that fosters social cohesion and, on the other hand, deviant or ‘risky’ differences that undermine social cohesion (Van Munster, 2009).

To an important extent, NPO’s efforts to securitize diversity – and thus to protect itself from being challenged on its public remit and value – are effective. They manage to render politically abject any attempt to bring back cultural diversity to its grounding in structural experiences of ethnic or racial difference, such as religion and tradition, but, similarly, racism, discrimination, marginalization and social exclusion. However, NPO’s security strategy also has its risks. This became evident in 2009, when the NPO launched a cultural diversity initiative, ‘Incentive Scheme Representation’ (Stimuleringsplan Representatie), which sought to stimulate broadcasting organizations to consider more visible representation of ethnic minorities. PowNed – one of the two new right-wing broadcasting organization that promised to represent the anti-establishment voice in public broadcasting – reacted to the scheme by creating a new section in its news programme. In the segment, ethnic and racial minorities, called ‘negroes’ (negers) by PowNed, were asked to randomly talk to the camera to ‘score’ on what PowNed termed NPO’s ‘migrant quota’. Rather than problematizing PowNed’s racist response, the NPO could not respond to the bitter parody. Politicians from the political left and right, who had not read the incentive’s documentation, were, however, quick to denounce what they similarly termed the ‘migrant quota’ in front of PowNed’s cameras.

Conclusion

This study has explored how the Dutch public service broadcaster defines and operationalizes cultural diversity in response to the political call to be a broadcaster in which ‘all groups of our society must be able to recognize themselves and in which they can participate’ (Plasterk, 2008: 2). Given the growing and problematic appeal of mainstreaming approaches in diversity policies since the late 1990s, the new efforts from public media to re-engage with diversity raise positive expectations. However, the analysis shows that such expectations are frustrated by the uneven treatment of cultural diversity in NPO’s new approach: some differences are supported, others are not. The result is an understanding of cultural diversity as compatible, non-threatening and adjustable. This complies with the ‘logic of linking security, utility and social integration’ (Carmel, 2011: 49) of contemporary Dutch immigration policies. In that sense, NPO’s mediation of diversity is at once constituted by and constitutive of the framing of migration and cultural diversity as a security issue (Carmel, 2011; Huysmans, 2006; Van Munster, 2009).

That NPO is involved in the ideological governance of migration as risk and, thus, the retraction of citizenship from those migrants or ‘new Dutch people’ who do not comply with hegemonic ideas of Dutch citizenship (Fekete, 2004; Prins, 2002; Van Houdt et al., 2011) does not mean that NPO is actively pursuing such aims. First, programming in public service media is increasingly bound by calls to attract large audiences in order to uphold its public value, particularly in relation to commercial competition. In this context, it seems reasonable to privilege programmes that are agreeable to a broad audience. Both producers of diversity programming and NPO more broadly are thus torn between the commercial logic, on the one hand, and normative ideas about what would constitute quality diversity programming and which may not necessarily generate large audiences, on the other. In addition, NPO’s principal concern in a political landscape marked by strong opposition to public institutions and anti-immigration sentiment is understandably to secure its own continuation. Yet, these complex challenges faced by public broadcasting in the Netherlands today cannot undo its complicity in the politics of exclusion.

Thus, while Minister Plasterk’s 2008 plea for the importance of diversity could have been interpreted as inclusive and potentially progressive, the realities of both immigration politics and media diversity policies are not. Whereas the securitizing approach seems to respond to the need to actually engage with diversity – unlike mainstreaming – the new approach excludes ethnic differences or reduces them to an ornamental level (Lugones & Price, 1996), while it supports and encourages legitimate (traditional, White) differences.

While our study on the Netherlands explicitly tried to account for the idiosyncratic nature of Dutch public service broadcasting in its role in fostering an inherently exclusionary social cohesion, to a significant extent, NPO’s predicament is also representative of other European public service broadcasters. That is why this article also underscores the urgency to imagine how European public service broadcasters – forced by the paradox of the single European market to at once open and firmly keep shut cultural and national borders – can design and see through policies for cultural diversity that reject assimilationist premises and, at the same time, display resilience against the security frame. Inclusionary media policies in Europe today should be able to ‘dilute an ideology of differentialism’ (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 121) and acknowledge the inherently structural nature and experiences of cultural difference.