Much praise in almost all national newspapers about the broadcast of Summer Casters With Femke Halsema. And rightly so, it was one of the better broadcasts from the long history of this program. Halsema had an interviewer, Griet Op de Beeck, who felt her good and seduced her both work and private life into frankness.
The interview seemed to offer me little ammunition to the many Halsema haters in the Netherlands, but I was mistaken about that. On X was praise, but again great anger. “I find her” just “a very bad person,” someone wrote, “she breathes untrue.” I was reminded of the sigh of Halsema: “They have to do it with me. People who want to hate me do that anyway.”
I was curious about the response of De Telegraaf, who has been demonstrating a groundless aversion to Halsema for years. Would they also dare to be unbiased and give her the honor of a successful broadcast? Then the newspaper should jump over her own shadow – a shadow that took on a hilarious and painful form on Friday 18 July of this year. Press history!
On that day, the newspaper performs the OM in one number in four places to tackle Halsema. The opening on the front page: A large photo of Halsema with the head ‘Halsema fought for imaging’. Later in the newspaper an article of more than a page with quotes from Halsema from 1,100 documents about the riots after the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv match match. The quotes were not interesting and therefore have outside De Telegraaf No stir.
Ronald Plasterk also devotes a column of half a page to Halsema’s objections to calls to cancel artists for their political views. This in response to a performance in Paradiso of Rapduo Bob Vylan accused of anti -Semitism. Plasterk believes that Halsema as mayor should be ‘more cautious and more reserved’ in her expressions.
On the next page, former alderman Geert Dales can also take out to Halsema. He follows her closely and wants to write a book about her. He calls her “an activist, bettweter and moralist.”
Verily a rich harvest for a weekday in a holiday period where it was quiet around Halsema. And then came Summer guests. The Halsema alarm went to the editors of De Telegraaf. “Guys, think about it!”
Mark Koster, ‘media journalist’, was allowed to write about it in his section ‘Mark looks at it!’ The editors will be taken with the result. The head: ‘spoiled Halsema’. Below that a Philippica against a mayor who had not “spoken about the daily pain of the inhabitants”, not about the working poor, not about the fearful elderly people, not about crime. It was “two salon ladies that sang loose from reality nice and chatted.”
Well, and those ladies just chat about thatcher and leadership, emancipation-women-hatred-lisa, the demonstration law, the consequences of 9/11 for the Netherlands, Halsema’s role after the riots around Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Peter R. de Vries.
I have good news. Bee De Telegraaf If they would have preferred to have Halsema filled for six hours instead of that poor three hours of Summer guests.