Bart Nijman wrote that Dutch media in 2015 portrayed participants in the Ukrainian referendum, including GeenPeil, as antidemocratic and pro-Putin. Nevertheless, he called the referendum a great success. In 2017, according to him, newspapers and parts of the NPO tried to boycott GeenStijl but were unsuccessful. He also accused the media of labeling critics of Greta Thunberg as climate deniers in 2019 and of presenting support for Black Lives Matter as a civic duty in 2020, while according to him, Zwarte Piet was pressured with unfounded accusations of racism. During the coronavirus pandemic, according to Nijman, the media shielded criticism of the measures and labeled those who deviated as irrational. He argued that this permanently damaged the credibility of the press and trust in its fairness and objectivity. From 2021, he stated that media opposed the farmers' movement with reporting on nitrogen that journalists did not understand sufficiently, and starting in 2022, labeled critics of Ukrainian accession to the EU or NATO's contribution to the escalation as pro-Putin. Nijman wrote that after October 7, 2023, many media condemned Israel and Jews in general and based reporting on genocide and starvation on lies. According to him, the media concealed the reasons for Hamas' attack and subordinated facts to information from NGOs, including Oxfam. He also claimed that journalists who disagreed were not offering enough public dissent, partly because they had to save for a mandatory heat pump in 2028. Furthermore, Nijman accused the media of shifting their own problems onto disinformation and Elon Musk and of leaving X for their own, small online environment. According to him, DPG, RTL, and the NPO imposed standards that many Dutch people did not conform to. He wrote that readers should hate the mainstream media even more and asserted that the free press had again chosen the wrong side on October 7. #Media #Nederland #VrijePers (translated)
