The ultimate German nightly news show is the ARD (public TV, Channel One) nightly news at 8:00 PM. It's a fifteen minute piece with no commercials. The last minute is reserved for weather. In the minute prior to the weather (plus or minus an extra minute), there might be some sports news. So the bulk of this (twelve to thirteen minutes) is REAL news as gauged by the ARD crew....sitting in Hamburg, and likely locked into a vacuum of a particular reality that they've created.
This is my humble essay to the production and craft by the Tagesschau 'crew'.
You can go and ask most Germans over their opinion of the Taggesschau, and you'd get widely varied opinions. Some Germans will suggest that it's absolutely all the news that you'd need as a German, and that they generally trust the crew to give an accurate view of Germany, Europe and the world.
Some Germans would go the exact opposite direction and suggest that the Tagesschau crew are diabolical and devious.....acting as provocateurs....continually working on a particular slant or bias to the news.
So you kinda have to search through the various stories and try to find some common ground.
How much German news do you get in a normal week? From my prospective as an American....it's a very limited amount of German news. With seven productions per week, adding up to 84 minutes of air-time, I would make a personal estimate that only 50-percent of the news delivered is about Germany, and a big portion of that is political in nature. There will be an occasional update on BER (the Berlin Airport), the Stuttgart-21 project, some banking scandal, or some chatter about VW diesel crisis. There's at least four stories a week that have to do with environmental stories (some internal to Germany....some to Europe or the World).
Murders? This got dragged into the topic area this past week because of a German doctor murdered by an African guy (migrant), and the Taggesschau decided to avoid telling the story. Public fury? Well, it's heated. The bosses at ARD are trying to explain that they don't normally cover murders except in certain situations. If this had been some terror freak and he'd killed three folks on a railway platform.....it'd probably get covered. If this was a single guy being stabbed by a migrant on the streets of Mainz....well, no....it won't get covered.
There is a growing belief that there's enough biased nature with the public news folks.....that maybe it's not worth watching. If you can't trust the Tagesschau folks.....well....then is it worth the monthly TV tax? And if the ZDF 9:45 PM news is the same way.....does this spell trouble for the public TV news people?
In simple terms? Yes, they are in trouble.
At some point in the next decade, there will be enough votes and pressure put on the 'governor's board' that supervises the ARD 'empire'.....to downsize. They will laugh when people suggest it but every month, you see more people frustrated with the system, and the biased nature of news. Someone down the line (maybe the CSU, maybe the Linke Party, maybe the AfD Party).....will have the voting power to take down the tax and force significant change.
I'm not saying this is positive, but they've gone to the level of defending their mechanism, and people aren't buying into the defensive position.
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