Belgian
media boss: Attacks are ‘reality check’
Christian
Van Thillo’s journalists have been at the forefront of covering the
Brussels attacks.
By ALEX SPENCE
3/28/16, 5:30 AM CET Updated 3/28/16, 10:16 AM CET
In nearly three
decades at the helm of one of the Benelux countries’ biggest media
companies, Christian Van Thillo has tended to leave political
commentary to his newspapers.
After the attacks in
Brussels, the Flemish media tycoon opened up in an interview, telling
POLITICO about his concerns for the future of the Belgian state.
Tuesday’s bombings
should be a “reality check for all the people running this
country,” Van Thillo said two days after ISIL terrorists struck a
Brussels metro station near major European Union institutions and the
city’s main airport, killing at least 31 people and injuring
hundreds of others.
Belgium is a
“fantastic country in many, many ways,” but its political system
“just doesn’t make sense,” Van Thillo said. An excessively
complex, divided and deeply dysfunctional political system has made
the country of 11 million ungovernable.
“They should
reinvent the way they lead and manage this country. That’s what I
believe,” Van Thillo said.
The comments are
notable for a businessman who says he doesn’t like to discuss
politics in public and has always tried to stay out of the limelight.
Van Thillo’s
family business, De Persgroep, controls a sizeable chunk of the news
media from Flanders to Denmark — including the newspapers De
Morgen, Het Laatste Nieuws, L’Echo, De Volkskrant, and Berlingske,
and a share in the Belgian TV channel VTM —but he has always
preferred to wield influence quietly.
This is no ordinary
moment, though.
Since the attacks,
Van Thillo’s Belgian papers and VTM have been at the forefront of
the news coverage of the Brussels attacks. It’s been frantic,
challenging, and highly emotional.
“You have tons of
emotions at the same time,” the businessman said in the interview.
The newsrooms are
flushed with adrenaline as journalists work around the clock, spread
out across the country trying to piece together what happened, who’s
behind it, and what might come next. There’s satisfaction as the
newspapers are widely cited in the foreign media outlets that have
descended on Brussels after the attacks, giving Van Thillo’s media
websites a huge traffic boost; Het Laatste Nieuws got 3.5 million
visits last Tuesday, three times more than normal.
Then again, “It
was one of the blackest days in the history of our country,” Van
Thillo said. And like all Belgians, he is still trying to get his
head around what has happened and what it means for the country.
Van Thillo, who
lives in Antwerp, was waiting for a train at Antwerp Central Station
on Tuesday morning on his way to a business meeting in Amsterdam when
he first heard the news about the explosion at Zaventem.
He was listening to
Qmusic, one of De Persgroep’s Flemish radio stations, when the
presenter reluctantly tried to break the horrific news: Unconfirmed
reports of a serious incident at the Brussels airport were all over
Twitter.
“Jesus, don’t
tell me this is a terrorist attack,” Van Thillo recalls saying.
Van Thillo carried
on to his meeting in Amsterdam, but he could barely concentrate on
the business discussions.
He spent much of the
day on the phone with his editors.
Van Thillo insists
he’s not the sort of publisher who tells his editors what to write:
He’s more in the mold of Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times,
or the Daily Mail’s Lord Rothermere, as he describes it, than
Rupert Murdoch. He’s engaged in the process and the business of
publishing without seeking to influence editorial decisions.
“Everybody knows:
journalism is free and independent in this house, and it’s holy to
us,” he said. “I mean, I’m religious about it.”
He’s not a
detached owner, though, and as Tuesday’s horror unfolded he
regularly sought updates from editors on their plans, pushing them to
be distinctive from their competitors. On Wednesday morning, he
called his Belgian newspapers, websites and TV station to express his
admiration for the coverage of the bombings in their own city.
“It’s very
strange to congratulate people in these circumstances,” Van Thillo
said.
Yet it’s at
moments like these that news organizations prove their true value —
gathering the facts in the most challenging and confusing of
circumstances, sorting the truth from the noise, helping people make
sense of the senseless.
“This is when as a
publisher and CEO of a media company you feel how important media are
to society,” he said.
It makes him
optimistic that the old newspaper mastheads can survive in the
digital era.
Newspapers that once
made healthy profits from print have been clobbered as readers and
advertisers increasingly move to the Internet. Analysts worry that TV
news, too, will in time be similarly eroded. All “legacy” media
companies are trying to reinvent their brands and businesses online.
Few have had much success so far.
Van Thillo is
hopeful that, whatever disruption technology brings, the marquee
names of journalism — those that have, over tens or even hundreds
of years, built reputations for authority, trust and accuracy —
will endure.
Events like those,
unfolding in Brussels in the past days show that people, more than
ever, need high-quality professional journalism to help them navigate
the “jungle of information,” he said.
“Everything we
have always been about in journalism, in my opinion, has never been
as relevant as today,” Van Thillo said.
If only he could be
as upbeat about the prospects right now for his country.
Authors:
Alex Spence
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