Suddenly the time had come on Monday evening, also for the Dutch public broadcaster. After weeks of heightened tensions, Russian President Putin recognized the two self-declared people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk on Ukrainian soil as independent countries. And as if that wasn’t ominous enough, he also said in a TV speech that Ukraine “has never been an authentic state of its own” and is historically part of Russia.
Read also the live blog about the Ukraine crisis
With the more than 100,000 troops Russia had congregated on the Ukrainian border, it was clear that the conflict had seriously escalated — even before Russia’s “peacekeeping forces” and their equipment had actually rolled into Ukrainian territory.
For the NOS it was no reason to completely change the programming, but it was mainly in the news and news hour pay close attention and gradually ‘scale up’. A scenario is not ready for such situations, says NOS spokesperson Onno Duyvené de Wit. „But we have more often breaking news and can respond quickly.”
That scaling up took almost eight minutes about the crisis in the eight o’clock newsup to half an hour in news hourand about eleven minutes late NOS News† Meanwhile, a slow blog had started, for which people wrote new posts all night. “We’re an online business, so you’re always on.”
The talk show fell out of tune on Monday evening On 1 (made by rotating broadcasters), where half an hour was first taken for the returning Olympic athletes, before foreign expert Han ten Broeke spoke to analyze the situation in Ukraine.
At half past six on Tuesday morning, the chief editor on duty (the HRV, or Chief Editor on the Floor) reported to his employees that the developments are now being treated as breaking news. This means that NOS is allowed to break into broadcasts from other broadcasters with longer newscasts.
“Of course consultation with the NPO is necessary, because that has consequences for the broadcast schedule,” says Duyvené de Wit.
No news channel like CNN
When asked whether the news on Monday night wasn’t big enough to completely wipe out the programming for an intercalated continuous broadcast about the crisis, he says: “We are not a news channel like CNN. Our consideration is always: can we properly inform the viewer? At the end of the evening we thought that with the combination of the eight o’clock news† news hour and the extended late Journal served the viewers well. When we stopped broadcasting, we would have told everything.”
It eight o’clock news opened with the crisis, while the situation in Russia and Ukraine was still developing. In almost eight minutes, in addition to Putin, correspondents in Moscow, Kiev and Brussels, the Ukrainian foreign minister and his Dutch colleague Hoekstra and the president of the European Commission also spoke. Impressive was the theatrical image of Putin sitting in a stately round colonnade in the Kremlin behind a desk at a great distance from the members of his Security Council, who listened to him on upright seats with their hands in their laps. At the end of the broadcast, Annechien Steenhuizen was able to report that Putin accused the West of crimes in his TV speech, which was still in progress.
Picked up on NPO2 news hour The matter was thoroughly discussed this Monday with no fewer than six correspondents, clear explanations by Russia expert Bob Deen van Clingendael spread over the broadcast, a conversation with former Lieutenant General Mart de Kruif, and fragments from Putin and members of his Security Council.
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