ANP
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 11:45
WNL broadcaster Bert Huisjes is temporarily resigning from his job with immediate effect. He announced this in an internal email, which NOS has seen.
Huisjes writes that he “wants to make room for an independent investigation into facts and circumstances surrounding accusations that concern WNL and my performance. Mistakes were made by me and the broadcaster in the construction of WNL, it could and should have been done differently. As a result, people are in the pinch – I deeply regret that. The criticism has affected me and I take it to heart.”
The AD previously wrote about a culture of fear at WNL, which was mainly caused by broadcaster Huisjes. The AD came to this conclusion after conversations with 25 people involved in the period 2011 to the present. Among them were ten former presenters of WNL, including Eva Jinek, Roos Moggré, Leonie ter Braak and Merel Westrik.
Since his appointment as director and editor-in-chief in 2011, Huisjes has been systematically guilty of bullying, intimidation, manipulative behavior and pregnancy discrimination, those involved reported to the newspaper.
‘Poisoned nest’
The ex-employees spoke to the AD about WNL as a “poisoned nest” and say that the broadcaster was known among the employees as ‘Bertlusconi’ and ‘Angry Bert’. He is also said to have often interfered with the content of WNL programs in a ‘coercive’ manner.
In a response to that article, the broadcaster’s supervisory board said it supports Huisjes and is “lucky” with the editor-in-chief. This in turn led to sharp criticism, including from government commissioner Mariëtte Hamer. “All the things that came out were also in that Van Rijn report, all those examples and numbers are there,” she said in the NOS Radio 1 News. “I was quite surprised by the reaction of the board of trustees.”
2024-03-06 10:45:18
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