Generally, on a scale of one to ten....I give the ARD/ZDF 'club' a '7' on their ability to deliver the news. There are some pluses, and some negatives. So to my observations:
1. It's live....no matter what time of the day you flip the TV on to watch ARD or ZDF news...it's all live. So there are probably ten to twenty screw-ups you see throughout the entire year. A coughing attack here.....a video problem there....it just happens.
2. If some big incident occurs after 9 PM? They might give it marginal mention on the 9:45 ARD late news. They won't follow the 'big' news item like CNN would. So you'd get up at 6 AM, and they'd be doing catch-up work, with the bulk of the story told probably after 12-noon on the following day.
3. If you were to line up the sixteen German states and ID the top story in each state....it does not mean that ARD or ZDF will cover those sixteen stories. At best, they might cover three or four of these. If you want local stories, you have to watch the local/regional public TV networks (BR, HR, RBB, etc).
4. The 8 PM ARD news show is only 15 minutes (of which one minute is for the weather, and a additional minute for the sports folks). So if there is a 'hot' story which they don't have the time to tell it.....they add an emergency 10-to-20 minute broadcast after 8:15 PM called 'Brennpunkt', and some special journalist tells the entire story from every prospective. These used to be rare, but I'd suggest since 2020....there's probably a minimum of four a month now.
5. ARD and ZDF journalists will claim that they have absolute independence. The board of governors over ARD? They can hold a meeting....call the chief of ARD into the room and yank on his chain....then 24 hours later, a new path is laid out to the journalists to walk upon. It's rare, but it does happen.
6. The bulk of Germans are not news-obsessive, so they might read a couple pages of BILD or the regional paper in the morning at work or riding the train, and catch the 8 PM nightly news. That's it.
7. Are ZDF news and ARD's news basically the same? Well....you can sit and watch the two. I would suggest that the top five stories of both will generally match up. After that, you might get a different assortment of news items for the evening. One might bring on an expert to give you better insight....one might use statistics more than the other.....one might be more pro-political in their telling of the story....one might build a story to be more easily consumed by 12-year-old kids.
8. Last year (2020), the average viewership for ARD nightly news was around 11.8-million (83-million residents of Germany). I should note....purely on news, movies, various shows....ZDF will generally lead by a point or two over ARD. If you asked people about 'favorite' network status....ZDF tends to be slightly ahead. I'd generally give the reason that better produced documentary shows (Terra X for example) pulls in more viewers.
9. It's entirely possible that some event or action is taking place in the US, and neither ARD or ZDF will tell this story for days, and sometimes even weeks. It will seem odd to the German viewer when he finally figures out that this story has been out there for six weeks, and never mentioned by either network.
10. Between both news networks (ARD/ZDF)....they have a wide assortment of personnel who are either absolute GQ (in the fashion trend) or anti-GQ (terrible selection of clothing, styles, and colors). With the arrival of the better televisions....this fact stands out a good bit.
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