Foreign writers, please stop acting surprised whenever the Dutch do not live up to the stereotype you have of them. Stop mentioning "the country's liberal stances on marijuana and prostitution" in the first paragraph of a piece on immigration and Muslims. And stop pretending that the stereotype used to be true, but now, alas, things have changed.

This is Jasper Emmering at his Hollandaise blog. He’s right and his comments capture exactly my sentiments which I’ve been expressing here and elsewhere for quite a while now. North American mainstream media dived into The Netherlands in the years following the Fortuyn and Van Gogh murders and most articles started off with exactly the same lame introduction that Jasper highlights. The above quote is actually in response to yet another North American journalistic foray into The Netherlands - this time by The New Republic's Abigail Esman – and Jasper emphatically tears the piece apart.

One would have expected that the renewed interest in the lowlands at the very least would have sparked some more creative reporting and objective fact gathering. It’s interesting, but I have been doing exactly that for a period of three years on this is site, for free, with hardly any interest from mainstream outlets. One that I should mention however is The Economist – actually one of the better and more informed sources – where at one point I discovered one of my ideas recycled in a piece about the Dutch troubles. For a lot of media here there is no budget to get some dedicated reporting out of The Netherlands. For instance, I know of one major New York based newspaper which gave exactly that reason when someone approached them with the idea to become a dedicated reporter on the ground in Amsterdam (no, it wasn't me). Still, financial considerations should hardly be an excuse to serve up poorly researched clichés.

The downside of this flawed reporting is that even in the blogosphere some very faulty conceptions gain favor. When I was in New York for the Pajamas Media launch there were many observers who, like TNR, believed that the Dutch had now sharply moved to the right and that the small nation was in the vanguard of fighting the war on jihadism. If only. If elections were held today the left – consisting of Labour, Green Left, and Socialists – would take parliament by storm and have no trouble replacing the shaky center-right coalition that is now in place. The remains of Fortuyn’s party would be swiped away and the natural heirs to the professor’s platform - the Free Market Liberals - would suffer a very embarrassing defeat. There’s no need to get into the why of it, the point is that the Dutch are not moving to the right, they’re now even balking at sending more troops to Afghanistan.

Sure, the country overall has abandoned some of the politically correct paradigms that used to stifle debate and all political parties have become much more pragmatic in order to find new solutions. But that doesn’t mean a strong rightward turn as the TNR’s Esman suggests, or as Arjan Dasselaar argued last week: it’s all talk and precious little action. And, as Jasper Emmering points out, a lot of what now is identified as hard-right policy was in the making long before the Fortuyn/Van Gogh murders swept the country off its feet.

So, beware what you read. There are a few part-time bloggers out there who have so far provided far better and more accurate coverage about The Netherlands than some of the more established media have.