This is an interesting history lesson.
So originally....ARD (Channel One) was created out of Hamburg. It was written into the rules that it was a state-by-state network....meaning that the states of West Germany at the time (mid-1950s) had a control arm over the network...NOT the federal government itself.
In the early 1960s under Chancellor Adenauer, a draft idea came up to create a second network. It would not be a state-by-state apparatus.....it would be a federalized public network. Competition, in some aspects. Whatever news was generated by the Hamburg Channel One folks....there would be a news department of Channel Two, and it'd have a federal flavor to it.
Four German states lead a legal effort to stop Channel Two. In the end, the German Constitutional Court stepped in. The decision was....Channel Two would be controlled by the same rules as Channel One. It'd be a state-by-state ownership thing.
Rather than stopping Channel Two or simply integrating it into the Channel One empire (ARD)....they allowed it to function. It's just that the money or budget side of this would be a ARD thing. ZDF would report to ARD.
That's how you end up with two major public TV networks in Germany.
Now, if you ask....why did Adenauer go to this amount of trouble? Well....there is some belief that the SPD political folks had infiltrated Channel One (ARD) to such an extent in terms of news and chat forums....that you needed a counter-balance to present the conservative message. As silly as it sounds....this perception in 1961 existed.
The necessity today in keeping two major networks funded? Well....this comes up yearly and a fair number of Germans think that the cost factor is worth discussing. Eventually, there's going to be some massive change dumping one of the networks.
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