There's an editorial up on Focus this morning (Sunday) which begs this question: From the two public TV networks in Germany (ARD/ZDF)....there's supposed to be a balanced point of view. It's actually written down in the agreement plan that both had to sign onto. So the question is laid out by this editorial....why is it so difficult to be balanced, and why does it seem to be most all of their journalists with ARD and ZDF are playing the leftist view in their commentary?
It's an interesting question.
I would make these five observations (remember I'm not a German but I do pay into the monthly TV tax, so I'm allowed to observe things):
1. There are two avenues for TV news....the public TV crowd (ARD/ZDF) or the commercial crowd (RTL, Pro-7, Vox, N-TV, etc). If you go and view both....there are distinctive differences. The commercial networks are mostly neutral, and I'd give high scores on just simple facts. The public TV crowd, depending on who and what you are watching....it's pretty good odds that they are more of a 'cheerleader'-type journalist, than a neutral journalist. Oddly enough, you don't see journalists go from commercial to public, or vice-versa....which would beg questions.
2. The two public TV networks operate two news groups, and they are mostly insulated from the general public. They rarely get 'yanked-back' by the governing board. It helps that the board is made up of seventy-plus members, and is made up to a fair degree of political folks from each region. Maybe if the board were a dozen people and their full-time job was to monitor what was going on....it'd be different. But it's not a full-time situation.
3. Are there German dedicated to the two public TV news networks? Yes. And in the same fashion, there are Germans who only watch commercial TV news. So their perceptions might differ? This is a bit obvious, and you can always judge how people will react, if you ask them ahead of time....who they get their nightly news from. So the lefty-type public guy....might watch only public TV news? That's the amusing thing that you can take from this situation.
I once brought this up with a Brit, who made the observation that it's the same way in England, and that if you were a dedicated BBC-viewer....you had one central view of the events going on, and it differed from the person who mostly read their news from various newspapers.
4. Even if someone came to agree that the vast majority of public TV news in Germany was slanted 'left'.....then what? You can't really force these people to take a different prospective, and you can't let them go. Even getting someone in authority to say there's too much slant on the left.....that would probably lead the journalists to get all hyped-up and suggest that you might be a Nazi....to downsize your criticism of them.
5. The fact that a vast number of the under-30 crowd don't watch ARD and ZDF? This gets brought up on occasion. Politicians have warned the two public networks of the consequences.....which then created an urgent need to create a video-streaming 'channel' from public TV....dedicated toward the under-30 Germans (it's called FUNK-TV).
With Funk, you actually can't get it via cable or normal TV airwaves.....only via data-streaming. So who watches? That is debatable. No one argues that some of the college crowd watch it....primarily because it does offer some original programming designed for the younger crowd, which ARD and ZDF would never normally run on their networks. The network has even agreed to show and even produce some science fiction series (another forbidden thing on ARD/ZDF).
But does Funk really charm the under-30 crowd? I have my doubts. My son (in his late 20s) will admit he hasn't watched a single minute of public TV for almost fifteen years, and he'll even go to claim that the people he works with....are the same way.
Finally....I will admit it's an interesting editorial question to ask. But I suspect it's a bit too late to really trigger a change or cause some positive reaction. This current under-30 crowd are growing larger and more disenchanted with the TV tax. In a decade, there will be enough of them to make it a top five political topic and scare the public TV folks that the TV tax might be reduced in a significant way.
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