Michiel Romeyn had a terrible collision with Pepijn van den Brink, a journalist from De Telegraaf. “All kinds of diseases were made fun of. He completely taunted me.”
Dozens of episodes of Dit Was Het Nieuws have been deleted from the online archive of the media institute Beeld & Geluid due to changing standards and there was quite a fuss about this recently. Many journalists have written articles about this, including Telegraaf journalist Pepijn van den Brink. He even got into a fight about it.
Over the top
Pepijn reveals in the podcast The Media Week that he has been in serious conflict with Jiskefet celebrity Michiel Romeyn. “Yes, I spoke to him about Jiskefet. That was special. I had a longer conversation with him, but one of the things he said was: ‘I wasn’t wrong in the Second World War, was I?’”
“He says: ‘I may have made some jokes, but I was not in the Hitler Youth.’ And I had a huge fuss with him afterwards, because I made him read that piece, so the paragraphs with his quotes and the paragraph before and after. That was completely fine, but he went completely crazy when the article came online.”
Exterminated
Why did Michiel freak out? “Because of the headline. The headline was slightly different than what I had come up with. I always make a suggestion headline, but in the end I don’t go over the headline that is placed above it.”
He continues: “It was said above that he laughs at the removal of hurtful jokes from the TV archive. Well, that’s where he really was… I won’t repeat the words he used to me here, but people talked about all kinds of diseases. He really taunted me.”
Fascist shit newspaper
Michiel is a pretty frustrated person, Pepijn wants to say. “He made it seem like the whole piece was like that, so I said, ‘But I let you read it, right?’ He thought all kinds of things about it, but he really started screaming and if Jiskefet still existed, he would completely destroy us and we were a fascist shit newspaper and all kinds of diseases and stuff.”
He concludes: “It was very special…”