C‘Est le ton qui fait la musiquesay the French: the tone makes the music. It works just like that in the public debate, and especially on television. After a summer full of holidays of critical talk show journalists, the new television season started at least on steroids on Monday evening. With no fewer than six talk shows and a new season Lubach (RTL) The Summer Cucumbers have been replaced by spicy autumn peppers, and it was mainly about the neat -hard man of The Hague.
There were exactly eight (right -wing) politicians on television, who fortunately met just as many razor -sharp journalists, who wanted to know why the tone of last summer has been so false. Bee Jinek (NPO 1) Rob Jetten (D66) and Eddy van Hijum (NSC) were thinking of being able to hold a campaign arrest. But Jinek did not want to do that and continued to ask about ‘the ailment’ – the manners.
With the new RTL Tonight With Humberto Tan was a defeated Dilan Yesilgöz, who admitted to be often insecure and wondered if she is the right person in the right place. She concluded that this is the case, as long as she modows her tone and sets up her ‘ministerial cap’ again. To that tone it was “searching” for a long time, but she has now found it, she said. After a noisy summer full of blunders, that seems to be an increasingly softer tone, until it eventually stops. This is called a fade-out in pop music. She also immediately excluded GroenLinks-PvdA as a potential cooperation partner.
Ingrid Coenradie showed how such a fade-out sounds on the piano of the new talk show Pauw & Witteman (NPO 1). I mean of course Pauw & De Witbut Jeroen Pauw also made that discussion himself. Coenradie, the great asset of JA21, played the sweet song ‘River Flows in You’ for Joost Eerdmans. Bent over, concentrated and with the eyes tight on the nut sheet, Coenradie played decently, with a false nut here and there.
Pauw, in his own words “fanboy” from SBS talk show Today Insideopened the first broadcast by welcoming the viewer in “the clubhouse of the left -wing club BNNVARA, where the Netherlands is very welcome”. The conversation with Fleur Agema showed that the hard -hearted manners even come out of the Netherlands. The former Minister of Health leaves politics. It is a gang, and the people around the PVV would have called Agema “bipolar”. “If I am not safe in my own club, I will not continue with them,” said the PVV person from the first hour. If even the holy polarization fire has burned out with her, that seems good news to the tone of the political debate.
End -station
Fortunately, there was also humor: the absurd, dry -comic duo Herman van der Zandt and Paulien Cornelisse replaces Philip Freriks and Maarten van Rossem with The smartest person (NPO 1). In this first episode, the eighth politician of the evening was a guest. At Jelle Soepboer, still a member of NSC during the recordings, now leader of the Fryske Nasjonale Party, flew out immediately. The question he lost was about Kevin Spacey. Soup farmer knew everything about the actor, except that he was in the political series House of Cards plays.
Good news is also the journalism of Nadia Moussaid. In the shocking documentary The conscience of Israel (NTR, on NPO 2), Moussaid puts her thermometer in Israeli society. A society that ended up in the final phase of polarization. She speaks with the Jewish history teacher Meir Baruchin, who already shared photos of murdered Palestinian children on his social media on October 8, 2023. “The overall atmosphere in this country is: I want you to be like me, I want you to be precise like me. In your religion, your race, your political conviction, everything. If you are different from me, I feel threatened. (…) That is what our identity defines. The war. Jews are there. There is a Tondopthof No man’s land between the trenches. There is no more music at the final station of polarization, there the nuance dies. Fortunately, we are not there yet in the Netherlands, but it is starting to be time for a ‘fade-in’.