#4 The Lack of Alternative Dutch Media Sources

 Major corporations own the biggest part of the mainstream media sources, which means they are all driven by the will to make money. Most of the people in higher functions making decisions about these media  are men and you can see how this manifests itself in the media. You see images of women or other minorities as second rate citizens and white straight men always have the upper hand. As Catherine Saalfield said in her interview in the article Art & Activism  "The real problem is not how do we get more women working in Hollywood, but how do we get films that represent women's visions out." If there are no women making media products or can make the decisions about these images the representation of women won't be like the authentic experiences of women. Luckily there are alternative media sources in the world, but I think in the Netherlands there are just a few of these media sources which are very hard to find.

The alternative media source I would like to discuss is the alternative media platform Vrije Wereld (translation: free world), a Dutch media platform that is one of the first hits on Google if you try to look for alternative media. They claim to be a sovereign futuristic think tank and describes its main goal as follows: "There is only one truth, but there are many perspectives. Who has the most complete view about everything? Vrije Wereld tries to provide this view from many perspectives to the Dutch audience"(translated from www.vrijewereld.org).

On their site a disclaimer that not every opinion on their site is necessarily truthful, because there's wrong information everywhere in the world and that it is your own responsibility to know what you want to believe and what not. So it is pretty amazing to see how they at the same time claim to be objective and strive for a representation of the truth, their views are incredibly biased. An example is the article about Gloria Steinem and feminism, which start with this picture:

Which has the caption: feminist Gloria Steinem makes an illuminati gesture and promotes murder. Then it goes on to say that "feminism did not free women, but made them into slaves (because now you have more tax paying citizens). Cheaper slaves."(translated from http://www.vrijewereld.org/2014/11/02/feminisme-is-een-nwo-ideologie/) This is obviously not what you want if you think of an alternative media platform and it's a shame that you have something like this as an alternative for the mainstream media.

Another alternative news site that comes up if you do a little bit of digging is xandernieuws.punt.nl. This source has a lot of articles about 'forgotten' foreign news, but if you see how the articles are written they are just as bad as the former source. You can  find headlines like "President Hillary Clinton starts war against Russia" claiming that if Hillary Clinton becomes president she'll definitely start a war with Russia. Another one is Barack Obama who is claiming to rule as an emperor, with the following picture:

All the articles are posted under the name Xander and there's no links to extern sources to find. This is also by no means a reliable news source and this one of the easier to find alternative news sources.

These are only two examples of online Dutch alternative sources, but most of them are comparable in their views and the way of expressing them in articles. There are 'news sites' who use satire and parodies to make the readers think about the credibility of news sources (like for example www.speld.nl), but they don't try to offer this themselves. It is amazing to see that for Dutch news sources the mainstream sources are still the newspapers that existed when the country was still segregated in different religious communities. Although there's of course the separation of religion and state and there has been a very strong decline in the amount of people practicing religion, the power structure where they are led by white males is still standing strong. Luckily with the access to the internet it is possible to find alternative media sources from abroad.  

Sources:

Catherine Saalfield Art & Activism

www.speld.nl

www.vrijewereld.nl

www.xandernieuws.punt.nl