"We're not, that's not how we understand each other," said the chairman of the WDR Broadcasting Council, Rolf Zurbrüggen, last Wednesday at the committee meeting.
What he means is the criticism leveled by the experienced councilors Gerhart Baum and Jürgen Bremer (FAZ, August 11): The Broadcasting Council often allows itself to be pushed into a defensive stance and those responsible for broadcasting stations to explain what's going on.
More participation in program policy and control is necessary if you don't want to be seen as a "knock-off club".
If you follow Zurbrüggen, it's all very different.
At WDR, the committees are "well equipped" and the conditions under which the office works are "excellent".
The director and ARD chairman Tom Buhrow also sees it this way and points out that ten employees work in the committee office.
There is nowhere else in the ARD.
"The times when people said supervision was a nuisance are probably over," says Buhrow.
He was “glad about this supervision.
Small-scale supervision is often exhausting enough, but it makes us better.” That sounds good, very different from the RBB, where the director and the chairman of the board of directors hatched shady things and the rest of the committees were asleep.
Let's see that it's completely different at WDR, for example when it comes to the renovation of the film house, which was estimated at 80 million euros and is now at 240 million euros.
The fee commission KEF had complained that the WDR was building too expensively and did not recognize planned expenditure of 69 million euros.
We like to believe that everything that goes wrong at RBB will work out at WDR.
But the broadcaster's committees can also prove this.