Wierd Duk finds it incomprehensible that SBS 6 initially teamed up with Art Rooijakkers and Malou Petter to present the right-wing TV news News of the Day. “A real mismatch.”
Art Rooijakkers and Malou Petter left this year as presenters of News of the Day, because they thought the section was much too right-wing, especially by Wierd Duk. Thomas van Groningen had less trouble with that and he is now the regular face of the evening program on SBS 6. And Wierd is also still present.
Weird mismatch
Does Wierd miss his two former colleagues? No, he says in the Panorama. “I don’t miss them, but I hope they are doing well. It was a strange mismatch. When the program started, I already thought: making a populist, conservative program with these presenters? That won’t work.”
He continues: “The problem is that people at the NPO – and that is where Art and Malou come from – cannot imagine that there is another world. A world in which different opinions apply, other sources are consulted. That world does not exist for them.
VVD sauce
Art and Malou did not know what they were getting into, according to Wierd. “They thought: we will go to Talpa and do exactly the same as with the NPO, but with a VVD sauce. But if you want to make a program for ‘the Netherlands that has dropped out’, then you should not come with the VVD.”
He continues: “The VVD is the starting point, but behind it is a whole world of people who have completely disconnected from the mainstream media. Those people listen to podcasts by Joe Rogan, they know Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson and Konstantin Kisin, they read alternative sources.”
Tokkies
Wierd is happy to serve those supporters. “The elite thinks: they are all idiots. But that makes no sense at all, these people are often better informed than they are! There is an intellectual world behind this that the NPO does not know and has always written off.”
He sighs: “And because they don’t know that world, when they see me at the NPO they think: that’s a Nazi. While I simply represent that world.”