Unfortunately, I have never had a bag of dog faeces shoved in my face, as happened to the German critic Wiebke Hüster after her criticism of the choreographer Marco Goecke. Well, I had an experience that comes close.
In 1997, as a TV critic, I wrote of NRC Handelsblad an article on Willibrord Frequin under the headline, “The Face of Lynch Journalism.” Frequin had a reporter’s column on RTL 4 in which he approached people who were suspected of a crime – but had not yet been brought to justice – with the camera running and scolded them with questions and exclamations such as: “Why do you rape defenseless girls?” and “Foul child molester! I’ll get you!” I called that lynching because Frequin used the supposed living room anger to declare people socially dead.
Frequin did not accept that and responded with the statement: “I buy a large tank of shit and I push it through the letterbox at Abrahams.” It was a quote that I later thankfully used as a blurb for a bundle of my TV critiques. I didn’t feel insulted or threatened because I’ve always been able to understand why people you’ve criticized harshly in public take revenge.
It is a natural reaction, something the critic must always take into account, even if he should not be influenced by it. TV critics in particular can be sharp because television is a powerful medium with a wide reach.
What Frequin did was not unique, colleagues such as Jaap Jongbloed and Peter R. de Vries had the same dubious practices at the time. There was an unintentional hilarious climax in TV Lynch journalism when Frequin visited his colleague Jongbloed with the camera at the ready at work. Frequin wanted to know why Jongbloed in his program deadline football referee Jol had nailed to the pillory. Jongbloed responded with a furious, “I don’t want this aired!” Lyncher lynched lynch.
Peter R. de Vries did not shy away from such practices when he was still emerging as a TV star. In 1997 he revealed all kinds of unverified rumors from stolen police reports, only to hypocritically say at the end of the broadcast: “Fair is fair – those informers are not always reliable.”
At that time, De Vries also filmed unsolicited people who were only vaguely suspected of crimes. I remember a suspect who was unsuspectingly weeding his garden while being filmed by De Vries from a car; the man was never arrested.
In 1999, De Vries suggested that an Iraqi asylum seeker had committed the murder of Marianne Vaatstra. The man was arrested and found innocent. When I was in an interview in Free Netherlands established that De Vries had played a leading role in this, he demanded rectification. I refused, after which he filed a lawsuit against me that he lost on every count – which he never acknowledged on his website. He didn’t appeal and the only thing I noticed about him after that was the icy look he gave me whenever he saw me.
I certainly don’t want to brush off his merits for crime journalism, but I have often thought: where a great crime reporter could be small.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of February 17, 2023