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The media landscape in the Netherlands

Like Dutch public life as a whole, the media in the Netherlands was very much divided until the 1960s along ideological and denominational lines. While the newspapers have now largely freed themselves from church and ideological affiliations, public broadcasting continues to be influenced by this so-called "pillar system".

Amsterdam / Grachten
Foto: dogwatcher, Lizenz: Creative Commons by-nc-sa/2.0

In total 14 broadcasting companies organised as associations furnish the three television and five radio stations with programmes. This diversity is meant to represent all social interest groups in the public broadcasting system. The public broadcasters lost their monopoly with the authorisation of commercial broadcasters in 1989. Strong competition comes above all from the RTL group with four television stations and SBS with three.

With just under 17 million inhabitants and four national papers, three free papers appearing weekdays and strong regional dailies, the Netherlands is a country of newspapers. One newspaper is read per day in two thirds of all households. The three large papers NRC Handelsblad, Trouw und De Volkskrant are rather left-liberal in orientation, and together with the conservative tabloid De Telegraaf – the paper with the biggest circulation – are considered to play a key role in shaping public opinion. Regular columnists at the daily newspapers as well as weeklies like the right-wing liberal Elsevier and the left-leaning magazine Vrij Nederland also play an important role in public debate.

The rise of the new media has increasingly put the Dutch papers under pressure, leading the dailies to expand their Internet activities considerably in recent years. The Dutch increasingly look to online media for their information and are particularly active on social networks. The biggest and best-known blog is geenstijl.nl (no style), whose right-wing populist articles exert considerable political influence. Apart from this one exception, however, blogs can hardly be said to play a role in public debate.

This country's media at euro|topics