Menno Pols, reporter for De Gelderlander, did not receive accreditation this year (free ticket and other benefits) for the three-day festival Manana Manana in Vorden. Reason: an article by him, last year, about the money flows within the club behind the festival. That club earns millions mainly from Zwarte Cross, the biggest festival in the Netherlands with 220,000 tickets sold. Accreditation was, however, granted to colleagues at the same newspaper.
The organiser, The Party Factory, gave the following reason: ''An article was written about the owners' private limited companies when the story was supposed to have a different angle and was only about the financial flows around the festival. This did not go down well. Also because no consultation was chosen in order to arrive at an article that both parties could agree on'.‘
Buy your own ticket
Pretty intense, of course, and the newspaper, and journalists' union NVJ, is angry. Because big money is involved, the boys and girls of The Party Factory are showing their teeth. That means a journalist cannot report on the festival. Although, of course, the latter is not entirely true: the journalist can just buy a ticket and do his job. He does not need the organisation's permission to do so.
Something similar played out recently around a blogger who no longer received free tickets from the National Opera & Ballet, also due to unwelcome reporting. This blogger's privileges were revoked after he went to war in several pieces against mainly the direction of the various operas and the intention to perform works by Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. Against the latter initiative, he even launched a petition, which was signed by some of his friends.
The angry blogger filed summary proceedings against the National Opera. Last week, the ruling known: rejected.
No barrier
In the detailed explanation states the court, among other things: 'The National Opera claims that it no longer takes [plaintiff] seriously as a journalist because he acts more like a campaigner. More specifically, according to National Opera, [plaintiff] has failed to observe a number of journalistic rules of conduct, such as striving for objectivity, making a clear distinction between facts, assertions and opinions and acting with integrity. Whatever the case may be, the National Opera's consideration to no longer provide [plaintiff] with free tickets on these grounds does not, as said, constitute an obstruction of freedom of expression.
The two cases are not quite the same, but at their core they are similar. In both cases, a powerful organisation takes steps to "punish" a journalist they dislike. The journalist - or medium - then cries out that there has been curtailment of press freedom. The court has now made it clear in the Keegel case that this freedom of the press is not at issue. It is merely a question of withdrawing benefits for journalists. Journalists can continue to do their work as usual, albeit with a slightly deeper pocket to do so.
No privileges?
On the contrary, the riot that Olivier Keegel set up prompted some to call for a complete end to free tickets. Not only for journalists, but also for sponsors and donors in the world of culture. While this has been a practice in the sector since time immemorial and indeed happens at subsidised institutions, it would create a bubble of the privileged. At taxpayers' expense.
However, the question is whether that kite holds true in the case of journalists: as long as they are employed by a rich publishing group like De Persgroep (two-thirds of newspapers in the Netherlands), which recently posted a 20% profit, it is not a problem. The problem, however, is that the coverage of arts and culture in precisely those large and powerful media is under pressure. Indeed, arts coverage takes a lot of time (reading books, visiting performances), making a permanent arts employee - paid in hours - too expensive. That is why art reporting - even at profitable publishers - is done by freelancers. These do their work for a fee of 13 cents per word. If those themselves also have to go and buy their tickets to the opera, they are putting in money.
Power
So free tickets and accreditations for journalists and bloggers are a way of getting coverage at all. That this also allows you to direct coverage of your event is an awkward side effect. In the subsidised part of the industry, refusing free tickets is limited to a single incident. The power is undesirably great, though, especially as it increasingly involves small independents with minimal turnover. Suppose the Opera makes what you think is a genuinely bad choice in artistic policy: how often and how sharply can you write that down? And who decides what is objective?
The question is whether that power becomes too great, especially when it comes to subsidised institutions that are responsible for spending money that belongs to all of us. In fact, allowing and facilitating review should be an obligation for those institutions.
For purely commercial institutions, of course, no such thing applies. However unfortunate we in the free press may find it. Someone with their own business is allowed to do whatever they want.
Chaos
If publicly funded institutions were no longer allowed to express a preference as to whom they give free tickets, potential chaos would ensue. After all, anyone can create a web page and say they will write about your expensive event. Journalism is - thankfully - not a protected profession. Without selection, you could then sell out The Music Theatre to bloggers a hundred times over.
No more free tickets? For no one? Then art reporting becomes a business for wealthy journalists. And those, it should be clear, are very thin on the ground. It would also make the gap between rich and poor impossibly much wider.
What next? You may say.
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My ears are ringing. As a journalist, you should not accept free tickets precisely to guarantee your journalistic freedom. If, as a journalist, you are also a lover of culture, you would do well to support culture financially. When something becomes free it loses its value.
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