Nine hours of the Queen’s funeral, on multiple channels at the same time? We finally have to talk about the level of broadcasting fees.
Oh, oh, a text about public broadcasting funding – on ntv.de! Calm down, dear readers. I’m not employed here and I’ve also made a pretty good living from fees myself: I worked as a moderator for ZDF, and as an editor, for RBB I was a lawyer in the legal department. In a way, I’m sitting in my favorite place: between all chairs. But enough is enough.
You may think what you want of the Queen: Nine hours of continuous broadcasting about a funeral on two publicly funded channels at the same time is hardly a fulfillment of the “basic service in public broadcasting”, as the Federal Constitutional Court once defined it. This happy waste of money was the finale in a series of scandals that the formerly GEZ-financed broadcasters have never experienced before. I don’t even want to talk about the TV program, parts of which are so toxic-stupid that even a toaster loses IQ points just by looking at them.
As is well known, we afford the most expensive radio on the planet. For comparison: the BBC, with half of the German 8 billion euros, is at least twice as awake and alert in times of crisis – the broadcaster is internationally renowned. When Putin gave his war speech on February 21, 2022, only private companies and the BBC broadcast the events live, the German fee-financed ones dozed off.
FDP boss and Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner is now demanding that no director should earn more than the chancellor, and that the fees should also be capped. The CDU calls for a streamlining and, even more remarkable, a gender ban for broadcasting.
Sounds good, but basically that’s about it. In a few months these demands will be forgotten. But if we don’t reform public service broadcasting, sooner or later it will go under – and that would actually be a disaster.
What kind of scandals are we waiting for? Bonuses and salaries in the management floors that would make Louis XIV blush with shame? There are already. At the RBB, luxurious conditions in the management floor and a breathtaking failure of compliance come to light. But perhaps the most amazing thing is the chutzpah at the top: After criticizing massage chairs and watered walls, the fired director strikes a pose at a photo shoot as if she had just successfully covered up a murder.
At BR it is known that a BR director was also allowed to use two drivers for private excursions – which, as at other locations, is also reported by the publicly funded editors themselves. If you consider the precarious situation of some “fixed suitors” who work for the public service and have to be financed by their parents until the possibly unattainable breakthrough, this is particularly understandable. You make money above, not below.
At the NDR, the director of the state radio station seriously believes that her “suggestions” for topics for her daughter, who works in PR, do not come with a kind of built-in authority: “If the editorial team got the impression that my daughter’s customers should be given preferential treatment, I regret it that,” the statement said. Responding to high treason against the constitutional information mandate with a non-apology shows even more about the conditions in the NDR than the scandal itself. At the same station, the editor-in-chief finds it irrelevant whether journalists are friends with politicians. Someone lost their craft.
But the self-image of the public is bulletproof, it goes something like this: Private broadcasters, greedy for advertising money, dumb down the unsuspecting population, broadcast shallow entertainment and are unfortunately (because of stupidity) unable to distinguish truth from fake. The knights of fee financing must therefore gallop up on white horses to record reality for the stupid citizens – and that includes, yes, gendering from time to time.
This saga is based on the unshakable words of the Federal Constitutional Court, formulated in meanwhile 14 broadcast judgments. The short version: Public service broadcasting should continue forever as before, come what may. Like the sea goddess Thetis with her Achilles, the highest German court repeatedly immersed ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandradio in the death river Styx for years to make them invulnerable – and immobile.
There are also all sorts of non-legal reasons why public broadcasting can let almost any criticism roll off. One of them: Politicians rule with us. Ilse Aigner, for example, a member of the board of directors of Bayrischer Rundfunk and the CSU, said recently that the supervisory bodies, which have just been criticized, are actually well positioned. Incidentally, she is also President of the Bavarian State Parliament. This amalgamation in the supervisory bodies also determines personnel decisions in the public sector, as the Brender affair showed – it could hardly be more important.
The 8 billion colossus is also a bulging wallet for the cultural world. In the more eloquent words of the Culture Council: “Public broadcasting is of great importance for all artistic disciplines (music, performing arts and dance, literature, fine arts, building culture and monument culture, design, film and audiovisual media, socioculture and cultural education). .”
Public broadcasters are great clients for every media person. Nobody likes to piss him off – neither do I. When I recently received a friendly, ultimately rejected, offer from a publicly funded broadcaster, I realized that suddenly someone had planted a pair of scissors in my skull. With that I wanted to refrain from angry tweets in the future, because ARD, ZDF and Co. pay relatively fantastic and you don’t break yourself. Fantastic perspectives. The WDR alone employs over 4,000 people.
This is one of the reasons why there is no sustainable debate beyond flashes in the pan. There are no open letters from underinformed three-quarter celebrities to clarify important political issues such as the 9-euro ticket or the Ukraine war. Because a lot of people earn mediocrity on the 8 billion system, including three-quarter celebrities. “The only ones who would really lack something, namely fees, fees, salaries: these would be all the people involved in the production of these fictions. The German fiction industry lives on the fees, just as coal mining lived on subsidies for decades.” , wrote the culture editor Claudius Seidl recently in the FAZ.
And finally: Some editors of the public service, whose professionalism is not in question, are loyally opposed. I remember well the numerous admonitions that I should finally say “contribution service” instead of “GEZ”. As if the silly Orwellian rebranding of broadcast marketing were binding on the general public. Anyone who has seen the merciless brutality of the GEZ warning points up close wonders why a much worse word wasn’t found for these people.
And finally, there is the toxic neighborhood in the critics’ camp: anyone who criticizes public service broadcasting is thrown a brown and black coat. Below that, it’s hard to tell which allegations against ARD, ZDF and Co. are legitimate and which aren’t. Example gender ban: As much as it gets on the nerves and may violate grammar, a state ban, as the CDU is currently proposing – garnished with the combat term “public educational institution” – would be a disproportionate encroachment on media freedom. The public service system is not McDonald’s where you can return a Royal TS if you ordered Chicken McNuggets.
The ÖRR is important. It is a monolith in some areas and especially on regional television: Newspapers are condensing their regional editions, they lack the money, technology and staff for attractive online presence with video. There are countless formats that rely on public funding. Even if the supervisory bodies of ARD and ZDF pay much more attention to clicks and ratings than would be appropriate in their situation, the public broadcasters are constitutive of democracy. Hardly anyone disputes these core functions.
The fee-financed institutions must get their obesity under control. If they don’t starve themselves down to their constitutional information mandate now, enabling a substantial reduction in fees, its future looks bleak. Because at some point a debate about the whole thing begins: Then there is a threat of the fee being abolished – France has just shown the way.
