The Holland Bureau: On avalanches, arrogance and media ethics: the Friso case

Media ethics – specifically, what the limits are to media efforts to ‘get the story’, or more bluntly, do media ethics exist? – are definitely in vogue as a serious subject these days, writes the Holland Bureau‘s Giles Scott-Smith.

The Leveson enquiry in Britain has taken the cover off tabloid culture and shone a bright light into the sordid world of ‘celebrity journalism’, its illegal practices, and its intimate relations with the corrupt forces of ‘law and order’. The News of the World crashed as a result (oh, such a loss!), only for Rupert ‘Ethics? Me?’ Murdoch to revive it with a new Sun on Sunday. Meanwhile the police raids and damages payments continue.
Scoop
thIn the Netherlands the ethics issue has recently been brought into the spotlight by one single article, with no phone hacking or bent cops in sight. On Friday 17 February Prince Johan Friso, the youngest son of Queen Beatrix, suffered serious injuries in a skiing accident in Switzerland and was taken to the Intensive Care unit in Innsbruck. With the Dutch media falling over themselves to get a clear picture of the situation, and the RVD (government news service) keeping quiet to avoid any hasty response, the NRC Handelsblad was handed what looked like a scoop. Grabbing it with carefully gloved hands, the issue has instead turned into a bad case of blowback for the paper and its lead-from-the-front chief editor, Peter Vandermeersch.
The article in question was by NRC editor Jannetje Koelewijn, appearing on the front page on Saturday 18 February under the headline ‘How will Prince Friso’s brain maintain its condition?’ In the opinion-page style that has become NRC‘s trademark since Vandermeersch took over, Koelewijn described how on that very Friday afternoon she just happened to be near Innsbruck with her emeritus professor brain specialist (not named in the original article) when they get the news over Friso by phone. Who made the call is not stated (it turned out to be her sister, also a journalist). And before you know it, Koelewijn and hubby are in the intensive care unit discussing the details with the chief surgeon Claudius Thome. ‘Is it true,’ she writes, ‘what the Austrian media have reported: that Johan Friso has a fractured skull?’
Facts
This question is the basis for what follows, because Koelewijn uses it to insist that she is being a good journalist by checking the facts. Hubby chums up to Thome and Koelewijn, having announced her role as journalist, is given a few choice details: Friso had not suffered a skull fracture but it was too early to tell what the consequences of his lack of oxygen under the snow (thought to be 20 minutes) would be. By publishing this detail on the Saturday the paper was ahead of any official statements concerning Friso’s condition.
That this single announcement has caused such uproar over the past week says a lot not only about how the Dutch view their royal family but also about how the ethics of the article touched a raw public nerve. On what grounds did Koelewijn, her now-no-longer-anonymous hubby Kees Tulleken, and ultimately Vandermeersch himself decide that they had the right to override the official silence on Friso’s health? Wasn’t this ‘scoop’ little better than the kinds of sensationalist journalism usually associated with Britain’s finest tabloids?
Media spotlight
Koelewijn, Tulleken, and Vandermeersch were soon put under the media spotlight to answer these questions in detail, the NRC journalists on the high-profile talk-show De Wereld Draait Door and the surgeon on the equally-influential Pauw en Witteman. Faced with this attention, Koelewijn and Tulleken came across as the kind of arrogant duo you need to avoid at a sub-standard cocktail party. She had already claimed legitimacy for the article by a) saying it was a public service to bring good news out in a period of somberness, and b) effectively saying that she and hubby were ‘the right kind of people’ i.e. Tulleken used to be the neighbour of Friso’s wife Princess Mabel and he had once ‘operated on’ Prince Bernhard. Insiders – intimi – who can be trusted to act in the interests of ‘the family’ and ‘the nation’. In the talk-show spotlight, the potential contradiction between the two claims were gratuitously pushed aside with a (regal?) wave of the hand.
Facing (an avalanche of?) public outcry, Tulleken defended his case in the NRC on Monday 20th by emphasising that he was simply correcting the false news circulating at the time and so “taking the pressure out of the kettle.” On tv Paul Witteman’s several attempts to question why Tulleken thought he had the right to do so were not deemed worthy of an answer. Koelewijn’s approach to this question was even more toe-curling: the royal family are ‘our family’, they belong to and are part of ‘the nation’, and so this kind of news is of immediate public value. In short – they were doing the people a favour. Of course, they never asked ‘our family’ who they know oh so well what they thought about this act of generosity.
They were not the only ones in the firing line. What Thome thought he was doing talking on the record about the intimate condition of a famous patient has rightly received its fair share of criticism. Koelewijn’s declaration in the article that Thome’s unit “have a lot of experience with VIPs” sounds ridiculous in this context – does this guy go around telling details to journalists about everyone he treats?
Bad news
But its Koelewijn and Tulleken who have to take the flak, because they sought out the information and then published it – only for it to come out, several days later, that it was far from the whole truth. Friso was under the snow for around fifty minutes, had suffered a heart seizure, and was without oxygen for longer than first thought. As a result, he has after all suffered major brain damage. Tulleken’s determination that he was calming everyone down now looks totally misplaced – it was ultimately very bad news.
In contrast to these sad for-the-nation antics of Koelewijn and Tulleken, neither of whom have shown any regrets (far from it – it is everyone else who clearly misses the point of their heroism for ‘the truth’) Vandermeersch has indeed understood some of the meaning of the episode. In a long defence in the NRC of Saturday 25 February (‘NRC, feiten en interpretatie’) he outlined the case and, noteably, distanced himself from Tulleken’s pompous arrogance. No-one wants high-falutin’ professors wandering around hospitals gaining private information to have it released in the press, and then claiming its in the national interest. Realising this, Vandermeersch stated that a medical secret is not a media secret – Thome spoke on the record, so it was at that moment a public fact. Crucially, the chief editor then stated that he should not have gone along with Tulleken’s apparent motive – to act as the national saviour by providing the ‘good news’. He got it wrong.
False call
Its not the paper’s job to go around claiming they speak ‘for the nation’ – only the lower ends of the Murdoch media spectrum do that. Maybe the Queen, it being her son, could decide what, when and where on that point. Vandermeersch knows that all to well, and he made a false call. His reputation rests on having saved the Belgian paper De Standaard by introducing a mix of investigative flair and populist banter, and his attempt to do the same at the NRC had been going well up to this point. This time he’s burnt his fingers good and proper.