Malou Petter lashes out at her former colleagues from SBS 6, with whom she made the program News of the Day. “Just complaining about things that aren’t going well. Dear boys,” she fumes.
It was a strange combination from the start: Art Rooijakkers, known as left-progressive, and Malou Petter who were going to present the Telegraaf news of the Day for SBS 6. Ultimately, they both got tired of Wierd Duk and fled. They have now been replaced by the right-wing Thomas van Groningen.
Telegraph label
Didn’t Malou know what she was getting into because of that Telegraaf label? “For me, De Telegraaf is much more than just opinion columns. The newspaper is good at translating the news to the people it concerns,” she says in the Dragonfly.
She continues: “It gradually became apparent that the program was not an extension of De Telegraaf as a whole, but mainly of the opinion. Instead of News of the Day, it became more of Opinion of the Day.”
No journalism
Opinion makers took on an increasingly important role, says Malou. “Journalistic values that I find important, such as hearing both sides and telling a story from different sides, mattered less and less. I had difficulty with that. In addition, as a journalist I want to connect and tell hopeful stories.”
News of the Day was especially heavy-handed, she thinks. “Just complaining about everything that’s not going well. ‘Gee guys,’ I thought, ‘please!’ You can express your gut feelings, but when you talk to each other, the facts are the starting point.”
Status holders
You don’t want to correct every evening that not all homes go to status holders, says Malou. “Of course there were heated discussions behind the scenes and I tried to turn the program more in my direction, but at a certain point it became clear that this was the course. And that’s fine.”
“It’s just not great that I go to work with a pain in my stomach. Then I can earn a lot of money, but what good is that if it makes you deeply unhappy? I had not built up fourteen years of journalistic integrity to throw it over the fence with a program.”