Lazia, 30 August 2026 — A claim has circulated that the Publieke Omroep Stichting (POS) carries its abbreviation because the letters also spell an English vulgarity. The Courant van Lazia has examined the record, which concerns the foundation that owns it.
The claim is documented, and by the founder. The POS was established on 13 October 2021 as the state body administering the Confederation’s public broadcasting. The paper’s own record of the foundation states that the abbreviation was chosen with a deliberate double meaning, and that by the account of Emiel van der Huijsen, then president and now Chad Lord-Stadtholder, “POS” stands both for the Dutch name Publieke Omroep Stichting and, in English, for “piece of shit”. Mahuset had adopted official acronyms for its titles and branches five years earlier, on 16 October 2016, so the initials were settled deliberately rather than by accident of drafting.
The claim, then, is accurate. An institution saddled with unfortunate initials normally discovers them well after the charter is sealed, and thereafter spends a generation maintaining that the letters stand for the words and nothing else. The POS has been spared that labour — the only man in a position to deny the second reading is the one who put it in writing. That foundation owns this newspaper. On the founder’s own evidence, the Courant van Lazia is the property of a piece of shit. We rate it True.
