On the cover of The Presence of 1980 stands the election of Ronald Reagan as the new president of the United States, not the inauguration of Beatrix. “Not even on the back of the book,” says Han. According to him, it says a lot about the zeitgeist. “The focus was more on foreign news. You can see that when you look at the newspapers and news from that time. That is a long offshoot of the Second World War. At that time we were very strong that we should not talk about Dutch news because that was nationalistic and scary. Over time, also since Fortuyn, the idea has arisen that what the citizen considered important has been missed. And then the Dutch news came to the fore.”
Utrechter Han van Bree stops Het Aanzien Van after forty years: ‘I have to rehab’
