Tim Hofman will sooner or later be exposed in a big way if his journalistic working methods are leaked, says Lars Duursma. “Careful journalist? No, it’s flat entertainment.”
Lars Duursma, our country’s best-known communications expert, will meet Tim Hofman in October reprimanded for wrongly accusing a reality candidate of sexual assault. He then also caught Tim quickly deleting tweets in an attempt to make his blunder invisible. What awaits him? A cesspool.
‘That’s missing with Tim’
It really won’t end well for Tim, Lars expects. “Tim likes to portray himself as a fighter against injustice. As far as I’m concerned, that means that if you cause injustice yourself, you have to deal with it properly and I miss that with him,” he says in conversation with Veronica Superguide.
The way Tim deals with his unjustified accusation against the reality candidate says it all, says the communications expert. “You would think that when it turns out that you have called someone a molester in front of so many viewers, you would make a firm correction. That did not happen, except for one sentence in an NRC interview.”
‘Very remarkable’
Tim is all about it views, says Lars. “The unchanged BOOS episode was still viewed half a million times, even after Tim knew it was wrong. I thought that was strange and I mentioned it in our podcast. Since then, we have been approached a lot by people who have had bad experiences with Hofman.”
And at some point, he expects, one of those experiences will blow up in Tim’s face. “You can never make everyone happy if you try to expose abuses, but we hear many concrete examples of situations in which people have been dragged in front of the camera under false pretenses.”
Flat entertainment
What kind of false pretenses? “From a fake DHL delivery person to outright lies about the real purpose of an appointment. As a viewer you do not get an honest picture of what happened. Especially if your statements are subsequently edited in a misleading manner.”
He concludes: “The image we get based on the people who approach us is one of a presenter who pretends to be a careful journalist but in reality usually makes flat entertainment.”