Today an article in the major Dutch newspaper "De Volkskrant". The example is from Rotterdam, where Liveable Rotterdam has organisational strength, a presense in the coalition running the city and a strong local candidate: Marko Pastors, a pupil of Pim Fortuyn. The headline says: "Rotterdammers not very fond of Marko Pastors". Okay. That is bad news. Rotterdam is one of the very few hopes for the Fortuynist movement. Marko Pastors is a strong candidate, who has shown to be a good and innovative administrator, one also with well-considered opinions on Islam and not afraid to voice those opinions.
The article shows the results of polls: Marko Pastors is VERY popular amongst voters on his own party and other right wing voters. He is not popular and not trusted by 80 percent of Left wing voters though. Well, there is a surprise. What is the thinking here? Are leftist voters the only one's who count?
There is strong polarisation between Labour and Livable Rotterdam. All parties suffer from this polarisation apart from ..... Labour and Livable Rotterdam. Wait a minute. Labour has been running Rotterdam since time immemorial. Liveable Rotterdam is just a 5 years old. And Livable Rotterdam is now cornering all the other parties in Rotterdam, apart from Labour, whose voters deserted to Liveable Rotterdam on a massive scale in 2002. So Livable Rotterdam is holding on to the voters who went over in 2002 and now also making inroads on the Right flank of the electorate. Great news.
The article goes on. It turns out that Rotterdam voters are very hostile to the building of mosques (62 percent) and strongly in favour to sending back Black criminals to the Dutch Caribbean (80 percent). These are typical Liveable Rotterdam issues! The majority of Leftist voters also support these points!
The article says that with this electoral position, Marko Pastors has an fantastic springboard to National politics. What? But the headline said that Rotterdammers are NOT fond of Marko Pastors. Now they conclude the opposite and say it is a great springboard.
Now people who are just scanning the headlines would never know that. I wonder why those journalists (Philip van Praag, Hans Wansink) wrote a headline which is blatantly contradicting the body of their article.
They would not have an agenda, would they?
1 comment:
Robbie Earl:
"It is in the interests of media groups to support the ruling elite."
Snouck:
Could you elaborate, pls? Sounds interesting.
Robbie Earl:
"If Liveable Rotterdam want to carry the city they need to learn to create their own, alternative, 'newspaper' (even if its just a monthly flier delivered through people's letter boxes)."
Snouck:
The have got a very professional monthly newsletter. A good dedicated website with a forum and a good amount of traffic and commenters.
Plus there are several Fortuynist forums with lots of Rotterdammers on them like www.fortuyn.nl and www.dutchdisease.com.
The media slant bothers me, because I am researching the period of the election campaign and the media hate campaign in connection with the assassination of Fortuyn. It is just frightening to see the level of hate that is being whipped up especially seeing what a friendly chap Fortuyn was. Fortuyn could deal with it, but for a guy like Marko Pastors without the charisma it is a different thing altogether.
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