TV editor Fanny van de Reijt has also stopped De Wereld Draait Door because she feared that the stress would be bad for her pregnancy. “You’re building a baby in your belly.”
Fanny van de Reijt is a well-known TV editor, because she and a colleague make her own podcast, namely De Mediameiden. She reveals in the latest episode of this podcast that she is also one of the former editors of De Wereld Draait Door who has had a very hard time due to the reign of terror in the workplace.
Knakworsten and DWDD
De Volkskrant revelations about Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and the culture of fear at DWDD stir up everything in Fanny. “A good friend of mine, with whom I also worked there, always said: ‘There are two things in the world that you don’t want to know how they are made: frankfurters and De Wereld Draait Door.’”
She continues: “Unfortunately, after this weekend we all know about one of those two things how it was made and I think we all need to recover from that.” It really touches me to read it all back together like this. I hardly read anything unfamiliar.”
Culture of fear
Fanny confirms the culture of fear that prevailed at the talk show. “Behind the scenes things could be really terrible. It didn’t happen every day, but very often and on a structural basis. The scary thing was, of course, you never knew when it was going to happen. (…) You were always alert to the fact that the mood could change.”
It felt very unsafe, she continues. “As editors, we actually scanned the mood all the time. And not only from Matthijs van Nieuwkerk, but also from his subjects, so Dieuwke Wynia or the compilers. Everyone reacted to that culture of fear. (…) That culture of fear was also there on nice days. It is not suddenly gone.”
Upset at home
Fanny has been on DWDD for three seasons. “I came home more and more upset. At one point I really got into trouble with that stress. When I was in bed at night my boyfriend really had to calm me down as I lay there hyperventilating. I was just on all the time.”
Fanny could watch it from a distance while on holiday in Sicily. “Then I really thought: no, I shouldn’t want to work like this anymore and it’s not good for me if I keep working there for so long. It was twofold: on the one hand out of self-respect and on the other out of self-protection. Then I decided that I would resign.”
Pregnancy
Her pregnancy at the time strengthened that decision. “Shortly afterwards I also became pregnant and that fed me enormously in the belief that it had been a good decision, because the stress on such a day largely plays in your stomach. That same belly where you are building a baby. You can’t combine that.”
One barrier to canceling was the financial consequences. “When I resigned, it was also said: ‘This is a really bad time to resign. Are you sure? Because then you have to pay back a lot of money.’ I said at that point, ‘Well, I don’t care at all.’ I felt so strongly that I had to get out of there.”
refund
Why did she have to pay money back? “We were part of an annual hours standard, which meant that you were paid in advance for all your vacation days and part of your overtime in the form of a vacation of about nine weeks, and then you had to work for nine consecutive months. ”
She continues: “It did result in me paying back money to BNNVARA every time until the birth, because I canceled my contract at a crazy moment.”
The suggestion that DWDD dropouts are weaklings throws Fanny far off. “I don’t want to let myself and my colleagues be portrayed as weaklings. We were able to handle the workload just fine, but not the working atmosphere.”
Media girls
The Media Girls podcast:
