Securitizing cultural diversity: Dutch public broadcasting in post-multicultural and de-pillarized times

Abstract

This article reconstructs the post-2008 response of the Dutch public service broadcaster, Nederlandse Publieke Omroep (NPO), to political pressures to reconsider its remit vis-à-vis diversity. It focuses on NPO’s reliance on pluriformity – a trope that describes hegemonic categories of cultural belonging in the Netherlands – to define which ideological differences deserve support. Pluriformity works because it incorporates and accommodates attacks on the value and remit of public service broadcasting. However, this achievement comes at a price. Through the way in which NPO strategically imagines its public remit, segments its audiences and produces diversity programming, the broadcaster reinforces a hierarchy of cultural difference. In this hierarchy, only those groups in society whose differences can be reduced to non-structural and hegemonic convictions are entitled to representation and recognition by the public broadcaster. As a result, cultural diversity is being securitized in and through the very institution that should protect minority representation.