Whether it’s a clueless gag in blackface, or pushing for a fee hike amid pandemic uncertainty, or coverage that leaves many in former East Germany feeling like they still live in another country, Germany’s public media are often their own worst enemy.
And they’re having something of a rough summer. The chairwoman, who doubled as head of Berlin’s regional public broadcaster, RBB, has been unceremoniously booted from both roles amid a corruption scandal at her home station involving big bonuses and using funds to cover private expenses. The allegations are now under investigation by Berlin’s chief public prosecutor, who tends to get involved only when cases are serious and high profile enough.
The chairs of the network’s oversight boards have stepped down, too, and a pox is on the entire leadership team. In a pretty unprecedented move, the wizards who run Germany’s decentralized public media system put out a statement that effectively said, “We don’t trust you. Please see yourselves out. Schönen Dank.” A journalist union is calling for a “new start,” and of course RBB’s own employees aren’t super thrilled with how things have gone down, either.
This is a bad look for any company. It’s worse when the company is public. RBB is one of nine regional broadcasters, which comprise the biggest chunk of German public media, commonly and collectively referred to as the Rundfunk.
Nearly 46 million households, with few exceptions and regardless of size, pay a flat, annualized fee of approximately €220 for a juggernaut of TV, radio and digital content that is meant to offer independent news, engaging entertainment, and be both reflective of and responsive to a broad and diverse public.1
With an average annual budget of more than €8 billion, Germany’s public broadcasters — in both absolute and per capita terms — are together the most expensive on Earth.2 To put that in perspective, BBC most recently took in a record €6.2 billion (the license fee in the United Kingdom is lower than Germany’s). Netflix should see around €25 billion in revenue this year, which unlike the publicly funded Rundfunk is far from guaranteed.
It is also allowed to sell a limited amount of advertising, which makes up a considerably smaller portion of total revenue.
Now, lest you think this is shaping up to be a libertarian harangue against public media — privatize it all! The market knows best! — here’s a quick recap of the Rundfunk’s real foes: private media full of schadenfreude when their cushier, public counterparts step in it; populist tabloids looking to drum up outrage and controversy; and illiberal, fake-news warriors who need no help making their lügenpresse case that the Rundfunk, in particular, is an unaccountable behemoth shaking you down to tell you what to think.
To put it another way: The far-right, Alternative for Germany party should never be a bulwark of democratic accountability, and a majority of voters should never be on the side of the AfD. Yet that’s the strange position the populists found themselves in 2020, when their members in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt said nein to an €86-cent increase in the monthly license fee.3 Polls at the time showed public resistance to the raise, and still do.4
You can make a good argument for a fee hike. Because the KEF — yet another body in the public media universe, which spits out calculations for what the fee should be — said so is not one of them. It’s a bit weird that a system meant to be free of government influence needs state parliaments to unanimously approve a fee change, but since that’s the way it is, there should at least be debate about it. Fifteen of Germany’s 16 states approved the increase without much discussion.
Of course, the AfD has ulterior motives. The party is firmly in the lügenpresse camp and would gladly massively restrict the Rundfunk if given the chance, which for what it’s worth much of the public is also against.
Ultimately, the Rundfunk went to court and got its raise, going into effect at the start of last year, but the AfD made its point. As the party that pretends to stand up for the disenfranchised, left-behind, small-town folk — especially in the east — against the liberal, cosmopolitan professional elite, it can score political points whenever the Rundfunk comes off looking like a mouthpiece for an urban, former West German milieu wanting more money to put on top of its pile of money.
A one-off tryst with an awkward bedfellow does not make this here that. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice an election cycle.
No; consider this a love letter, albeit a tough one, to a system in need of improvement, not dismantling, as Germany’s neighbor may be on the way to doing (TBD).
Ideally, all media — and especially news — would fall under a public, or some sort of nonprofit, model that’s walled off from financial and ideological pressures. Because journalism, and creative pursuits more broadly speaking, is by definition in the public interest or lacks an obvious profit motive and is therefore at odds with boardroom and shareholder demands. To tie what gets reported, and how, to the whims of market forces is begging for conflicts of interest. No journalist, writer, artist or creator should be thinking about how his work will sell ads or get clicks. Otherwise we could just show cat videos and call it a day.
As the unfolding scandal at RBB shows, however, being public is no panacea for nepotism, corruption, aloofness or largess. The checks-and-balances appear to have failed, and the oversight bodies built into the system stand accused of getting too cozy with those they are designed to keep honest.
So some rules of the profit-driven world are useful to the nonprofit one, especially when billions of euros are up for grabs. With the public as both paying customer and shareholder, it has the same right to know how its money is getting spent as anyone who holds stock in a company — perhaps even more so, since their investment is involuntary. And for-profit organizations do tend to drive innovation, more efficiently, than those whose revenue is a sure thing and who are under little (financial) pressure to perform.
German public media are not exactly harbingers of agility and the cutting edge, though that may have more to do with a general German aversion to change than their own revenue structure. To take the corollary of that 90s-era BASF ad, Deutschland AG overall does not exactly excel at doing new things.
But there is a time and place to keep doing what you’ve been doing. One of my first experiences in Germany — during a week-long program in 2008, when I knew nothing about anything here — was watching a big-ticket soccer match and getting fed at halftime not a PepsiFanta-sponsored spectacle or ads selling pain meds, but a dose of very vanilla news.
I almost fell off my chair.
That means that just about everyone, even if only passively while standing in line to order your tenth Maß of the match, is absorbing at least a baseline of fairly by-the-book information about the world around you. In Germany, you have to try rather hard to be a total dunce, which isn’t the worse thing for a democratic society. That is thanks in large part to public broadcasting.
Many critics bemoan the high salaries that Rundfunk staff and management earn, and part of the RBB scandal is built around that point. A healthy chunk of the license fee does go to compensation and benefits, and Germany is one of the few countries left where working in news does not lead to automatic regret when meeting your marketing friends for a Feierabend beer.
If you’re a fan of unions then it’s hard to knock solid wages. Given the lot of low-wage speck in Germany, however, just how much the Rundfunk pays out is a fair point of contention. And from an output consideration, lavishly paid reporters and editors risk ignoring the very class-themed coverage that at least an Uptonian understanding of journalism would argue is the very reason journalism exists. Here, journalism is far from scrappy; in certain circles, it is considered elite and exclusive. I may have ended up in the only country where my overpriced degree in it means anything.5
This is where Germany’s public media starts to fall short, which is more than a little embarrassing since it’s called “public” for a reason. Whatever reforms arise from the corruption scandal, they are unlikely to include the most nagging one.
Say it with me: representation.
Each public broadcaster has an advisory board made up of representatives from religious, cultural, labor, political and social organizations: a who’s who of democratic participation. The board is there to ensure that programming reflects and serves a diverse public, by bringing the needs of each member’s community or interest group to the table and advising content accordingly.
But there are firsts among equals in this seemingly all-inclusive setup, and you can probably take a guess who is on top. While true that public media do provide a range of cultural content, presenting various walks of life both inside Germany and abroad, it’s the Catholic and Evangelical churches that have an added bonus: fixed slots for prayer and services.
Clergy members are not only on the boards6; they are on air. Every morning, Sunday and Christian holiday.
For those just tuning in, the Rundfunk is not a club. It is not Bavaria’s Christian Social Union. The CSU can have as many crosses in their meeting venues as they like, and open and close their events with as much prayer as they want. They’re a political party that you can choose to be a member of and vote for (or not).
Public broadcasting, on the other hand, is a service that every person in Germany is obligated to pay for, under penalty of account seizure, debt collection or — in rare cases — jail time. There is almost no getting out of it. Though the Rundfunk is independent of the state, a state authority — the tax office — has the right to collect unpaid dues on its behalf. As such, some portion of the fee acts as a back-door church tax.
We can skip past the historical reasons that makes the privileging of one group over others a practice best avoided, especially in Germany. These days, the official church tax, which the tax office also collects, is coming from fewer people, as church membership plummets. Germany is becoming more diverse and more secular — increasingly non-Christian and non-believing.
So what accounts for this discrepancy between the public and the media meant to serve and reflect it? Part of the answer lies in that the Christian and Christianized folks in charge don’t see the problem. They widely fail to understand the difference between teaching and preaching, between cultural awareness and religious instruction.
But we provide all kinds of content for all kinds of audiences.
That was essentially the reply I got when I, for fun, poked the beast a few years ago and tried to dispute my payments on the basis of religious freedom (or, to be more precise, freedom from religion). You can imagine how that argument went down. Seen from the Rundfunk’s perspective, a church service and a documentary about the Navajo are basically the same thing.
“As we said, we consider the broadcast of church content to be representative programming.” In any case, we have our boards keeping an eye on things and they’re diverse!
Except they are lacking in that department. A recent, blistering study came literally to the opposite conclusion. Some of its findings: many boards are maxing out the number of state and political representatives allowed on them; young people and marginalized groups are woefully underrepresented, while “established groups” are considerably over-represented; and transparency is lacking.
Tl;dr: “The advisory boards exclude large sections of society.”
That the Rundfunk thinks it’s diverse is a telling reveal of Germany’s tokenized understanding of diversity and multiculturalism. A Jew for Jewish things and a Muslim for Muslim things and a catch-all foreign-sounding person for all the immigrant things. Box checked: a Schublade (lit. drawer, in this context: pigeonhole) for everyone.
What happens when the Jew is also an artist? The Muslim is a business leader? The immigrant is also gay? What does it even mean to have an “immigrant representative”? There are a thousand kinds of immigrants. The RBB’s current one is a franchisee of a major grocery chain. What might he have to contribute not as an immigrant, but as a business owner?
More often than not, the labor unions, industry associations, cultural institutions — the fabric of German Officialdom — are still the domain of the Müllers, Kramers and Fleischers.
In a previous post, I wrote about how in Germany everyone can seem like they’re on the same side. It’s not that there’s an overt agenda, intentional censorship or undue political influence, but that the state is often the default; we are all it and it is all of us.
In kind, it’s not that German public media don’t check state and government power — they do — or advocate for a particular party or position. It’s much subtler than that, the blind spots built on the assumption that the state is ultimately good, neutral and looks out for everyone.
But who is everyone? And how and when are they heard?
Intersectionality is a challenge that goes beyond Germany’s public media7, and is hardly unique to Germany as a whole. Yet Germany, given its size, influence and standing, rightly deserves more pressure to sort itself out. And its Rundfunk, given its purchasing power and responsibility to society, does, too.
If public broadcasters are the “mirror” they present themselves as, they play a decisive role in shaping the reflection the country sees when it looks at itself in it. So long as they remain convinced that “our radio, TV and online offers reflect the diversity and identity of all regions in Germany,” it may be that the people in charge are just fine with what Germany sees as is.
One side point of clarification here, because there is often a lot of confusion: Deutsche Welle, where I spend a lot of my time, is funded directly out of Germany’s federal budget. That is to say, tax money. As such, DW is more a state broadcaster than a public one, though considered editorially independent given its management structure. It is a part of the Rundfunk family, but since it does not receive any of the mandatory household license fee, it’s something of a stepchild.
And yet lack global reach. With more money than the BBC, you’d think the Rundfunk would do better at putting out content that big markets would want to consume. Granted, BBC has the advantage of already producing in English, but Netflix has proven that people will gobble up foreign content — whether subtitled, dubbed or adapted. On this point, however, I am cautiously optimistic, as the German film and television industry is having something of a comeback. Still, only a fraction of the country’s top exports are public. To take two recent, big examples: “Deutschland 83” was a private German production; “Dark” was Netflix.
For purposes here, I am oversimplifying what happened. Local politics and coalition jockeying were the real name of the game, but I’m fairly confident ‘Schland readers are not super interested in the political fortunes of Reiner Haselhoff.
Subject to all the usual skepticism of polls.
Some life advice for all the kids out there: The best way to be a journalist is to study or otherwise become proficient at the thing you want to be a journalist for.
One of the RBB officials to resign is a pastor.
The critical study falls into the same trap. Its proposed solution to the problem of insufficient representation? More Schubladen! That’s a bit glib, I realize, as the folks tapped to sit on boards are not pulled at random off the street. They are part of relevant organizations and, as such, presumably have the requisite training and experience to carry out their remit. Still, simply adding more interest groups can be an awkward box-checking exercise, even if well intended.