Rutger Castricum irritates Paul Römer, the Talpa bobo who has angered the men of VI. “There are so many helmsmen ashore who don’t know what’s going on!”
Talpa bobo Paul Römer was at the front of the queue to knock down Johan Derksen during the 48-hour media riot surrounding the candle story in Today Inside. He has therefore completely consumed it with René van der Gijp in particular. When the VI gentlemen sat down with three Talpa bobos on Sunday, Paul was not among them.
Rutger about VI-rel
Rutger Castricum, regular guest in the Talpa show HLF8, thinks that Paul has handled it clumsily. “Do you know how it went? I heard that from a reliable source,” he said at the table at Op1 last night.
He continues: “The large part of the management was abroad, they were on holiday. So only Paul Römer was in the Netherlands and he was just going to lose the men on Radio 1 for a while.”
“That’s nonsense!”
According to Paul, that’s just nonsense, he told me this morning on NPO Radio 1† “I was watching Op1 yesterday and then I heard Rutger say: ‘I have a very good source. The entire board was on vacation.’ Well, where then? I’ve been seeing them all week and they weren’t on vacation.”
Many experts in the media are not experts at all, according to Paul. “There are so many helmsmen ashore who know what’s going on, but don’t know what’s going on, and then tell them with great aplomb. Yes, yes, it will.”
Two Paul Romers
Paul does not recognize himself in the image that he has dropped the VI men. “It’s very funny. It seems as if there are two Paul Römers in the world, because when I read back what I would have said, I think: hey, I never gave that interview. You see that in the press that quotes start to lead a kind of life of their own.”
The media are really taking it all in stride, says Paul. “That [quotes] magnified, magnified, magnified, and before you know it you are the cause of all evil.”
silent
This time Paul is suddenly very silent about the VI riot. “I’m not going to say much more than the statement we issued yesterday, which is that we are in talks and if we have something to report as a company, we will do it. Anything you say more is more fuel for the fire.”
What does Angela de Jong think of Paul putting up such a smokescreen? She sabers him down in her AD column† “According to Römer, it was of course all the fault of the press that took his words out of context,” she writes cynically. “For those who missed it: listen back and experience how the term ‘hypocrite’ takes on a completely new meaning.”