The morals of journalism are changing. Spontaneously? That almost has to be because I never hear journalists complain about their working environment, they are not being blackmailed or anything like that. What did I see in terms of change? Well, on FB I saw a link to a biography on the VPRO site, about Peter Gøtzsche. I thought I had seen that portrait of Gøtzsche before. Interesting because he was an insider but had gone a bit off track with his conspiracy theories, or at least that's what I thought at the time. So I went looking to watch it again with a now refreshed look. Nowadays you would no longer be able to create such a pharmaceutical-critical document. It would be censored. My search led to real detective work. Tiles glow in backlight.
I still found the announcement on X. On the VPRO site it says biography: “This biography is part of the episode: Very expensive pills”. I looked at it but it was not the extensive portrait of Gøtzsche. It is a quite critical broadcast about the price level of medicines and the power of pharmaceutical companies. It's also surprising that it is still online. Gøtzsche is repeatedly featured with fragments from an interview that is also in the trailer (see both Twitter if Facebook) has been used. I also made a backup of the trailer.
The full episode "Peperdure pillen" can be found on the site of the VPRO. Farmak criticism, come back to that today. So put on your watchlist.
Here's the trailer on Twitter, for the October 7 broadcast:
Edit 7-12-2025: Caspar Kempeneers pointed me to a video on X in which I recognize the story that I had also seen on VPRO. You can imagine that that is no longer possible on our damn viewing tube.
The search for Peter Gøtzsche
Searching on the VPRO site for that portrait of Peter Gøtzsche (maybe it hadn't been a Tegenlicht documentary after all?) I came across two identical episodes of "Peperdure pillen", one on October 7, 2018 (in the list at the bottom) and one on November 15, 2018 (at the top). Same text, same thumbnail. Yet they link to two different URLs. A bit crazy, a waste of disk space but it will be necessary. Hopefully they won't do that with all their video material.
One links to https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/kijk/afleveringen/2018-2019/peperdure-pillen.html
The other to https://www.vpro.nl/programmas/tegenlicht/speel~VPWON_1298220~peperdure-pillen-vpro-tegenlicht~.html
(Edit 7-12-2025: this link is now dead)
The short title seems to me to have been typed in manually, the long one a generated title based on category, serial number, etc. Or was the October 7 episode perhaps simply repeated on November 15?
I browsed some more but to no avail. I also saw further no other broadcast was repeated after 5 weeks. Apparently this was a very special episode.
Meet Ups #135 and #136: debriefs
As a result of the Tegenlicht broadcasts, Meet Ups were held, among others in Pakhuis de Zwijger in Amsterdam. There are YouTube registrations of that so I went there to have a look.
It seems that someone at Pakhuis de Zwijger has been shooting there. A YouTube Video from October 5 has as its theme "VPRO Backlight Meet Up #136: Expensive pills“That's strange for a debriefing because the first broadcast was only on October 7 and those Meet Ups were there precisely to discuss the broadcast with the audience.
The video is also about something else: the platform industry, with the title: “Amazon is with us”. There was indeed a Meet Up with that title on October 3, 2018, about the backlight broadcast about Amazon.
But how does that "Extremely expensive pills" title with complete text come from a later theme with that earlier video about Amazon? That must be a copy-paste mistake by the content manager who looked at his calendar wrong. Or did it by heart, so without any agenda at all.
By the way, the same video about Amazon can be seen not only at Meet Up #136 but also on YT at Meet Up #135, now with matching title and text. 135 is a storage sequence number while that video of a Later Date is: October 16. That's crazy too. He must have been really confused. Or his agenda was backwards.
But actually: A video on YouTube, from October 10, 2018 has again the title and text of "VPRO Backlight Meet Up #136: Expensive pills” and it is indeed about the broadcast of October 7! That certainly seems to be correct.
Unfortunately, I didn't see a Meet Up mentioned in Amsterdam from the "Peperdure pillen" broadcast of November 15th. Well in Mortsel on November 21st. But it links back to the video of October 10th... (?) A month and a half later, a debriefing?!
And NPO Start now only shows the “Very expensive pills” of November 15. At least, just look at the screenshot below, there is not even a Tegenlicht broadcast of October 7 in there, which never took place. Too bad, maybe that's why they only aired that replay. Oh no, because it had already been discussed on YouTube. Yes, even before the first broadcast. Or… Well, better follow the agenda next time because that's how we get confused! Those media boys and girls are making a mess of it.
But read on below the screenshot with the missing October episode, there's more to come.
Numbers don't lie
In the list below (just source code from a web page, nothing special) you can see a list of the Tegenlicht broadcasts in order of broadcast date. The filenames of the videos associated with it are all around 12844xx. Except for one: the one on 15 November. What a coincidence. That file was created much later, as evidenced by serial number 1298xx.
The strange thing is that it is between 4419 and 4421, the order that is also visible on the page. That works out well for us because only 1 file name fits: VPWON_1284420. Looks familiar? Just look five items lower: there it is, at October 7. I mentioned that link at the beginning as one of the links to The page about the broadcast of October 7. So, on the October 7 page, the link used elsewhere for November 15 is there, while the link to the identical October 7 file is below it. It's exactly the same video, only the file from November 15 was created much later than other broadcasts from around that date.
Do you still get it?
I must be mistaken; I have probably seen that very pharmaceutical-critical portrait of Gøtzsche somewhere else. But what a mess from the content manager, they should really do something about that. All that data mixed up; duplications... if you are not careful you can easily lose a broadcast. You would almost think that the media has no agenda.
