John van den Heuvel will not go to Eva Jinek’s talk show for the time being. The journalist believes that the security of her studio and the screening of her audience are not in order at all.
You would expect that Eva Jinek has arranged the security of her talk show down to the last detail when there is a very seriously threatened guest in the studio. Well, not so. Although John van den Heuvel joined the program yesterday, two ‘activists’ still managed to seriously disrupt the broadcast with a protest against Qatar.
John stunned
The measure is full for John. He doesn’t come to Eve anymore. “Basically, I was already gone when it happened. It was agreed that I would sit alone at the table when my subject was discussed. But these guys were already in the audience, just a few meters away,” he says The Telegraph.
“Now it was innocent what they did, but if they manage to do something so easily, malicious persons can do it too. I was ‘not amused’ by what happened, neither was my security guards, and I let them know.”
‘Security must be better’
The painful thing is that John was a guest precisely to talk about the fact that he has been under very strict security for five years. Jinek’s security needs to be better, says John, and not just because of him. “It is also crucial for other prominent guests, such as ministers and other dignitaries, that security is optimal.”
What is the solution? “I think there are two solutions to avoid this. You can greatly increase security in the studios. Just checking people with a hand scanner, as is currently the case, is simply not enough. Then you probably really need detection gates. The other solution is no longer allowing the public.”
Op1 without an audience
The competing talk show Op1 has been broadcasting without an audience since the corona crisis. “And we have now left it that way. It is quite a complicated issue to organize that,” says editor-in-chief Bert Huisjes.
Bert sees nothing in hiring a professional audience. “Paid audience, we don’t start with that at Op1.”
Eva has announced that she will respond to the incidents in her talk show tonight in her broadcast.
