Director election at RBB: Wednesday is high noon in Berlin

The RBB Broadcasting Council wants to elect a new director as early as this Wednesday.

This is reported by the "Süddeutsche Zeitung".

The search committee wants to have found the candidate by Tuesday.

In this way, the Broadcasting Council suddenly shows a commitment that has been missing until now.

Michael Hanfeld

responsible editor for feuilleton online and "media".

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One does not like to speak of special commitment with a view to Berlin politics.

The silence of the Governing Mayor Franziska Giffey and her cabinet is booming.

Brandenburg was already more active there.

It had to be, since the state is currently responsible for legal supervision of the two-state broadcaster Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

The state parliament in Potsdam was initially active – originally at the request of the AfD parliamentary group.

There it was very unpleasantly noticed that neither the director Patricia Schlesinger, who has since been dismissed without notice, nor the resigned chairman of the board of directors, Wolf-Dieter Wolf, nor the chair of the broadcasting council, Friederike von Kirchbach, who has also resigned in the meantime, answered questions from the parliamentarians.

That was in the days when one reference to scandalous events in the RBB leadership followed the next.

Now the opposition in the Berlin House of Representatives is presenting a plan that justifies suspicion that the RBB will investigate the scandal surrounding suspected nepotism (consultancy contracts, rental business, secret bonuses, incorrect billing of entertainment expenses, massaging company car with a chauffeur, salary increase for directors, luxury refurbishment of the executive wing) itself .

The CDU faction and state party leader Kai Wegner proposes that the events in the RBB be investigated independently and externally.

Confidence in the internal control mechanisms has been shaken.

The Board of Directors should use an external team of five to eight experts.

They should include people who are knowledgeable about compliance matters,

someone with special media and journalism expertise and a "political personality respected across party lines who is no longer actively involved in politics".

"The control and investigation group must be given special powers and be free to choose their methods," Wegner suggests.

In the "Tagesspiegel am Sonntag" he said that the state audit office had to be able to "accompany and check" the RBB permanently.

That would also be in the interests of the employees, because "the misconduct of a few" is "also at their expense".

the state audit office must be able to “accompany and examine” the RBB on a permanent basis.

That would also be in the interests of the employees, because "the misconduct of a few" is "also at their expense".

the state audit office must be able to “accompany and examine” the RBB on a permanent basis.

That would also be in the interests of the employees, because "the misconduct of a few" is "also at their expense".

Everyone wants to control

A few days ago, the employees of the RBB announced in a resolution that they wanted to set up their own commission.

They want to name personalities from the workforce and from outside who will examine the Schlesinger system.

The enlighteners were to explore “how the grievances in management could be tolerated over such a long period of time, how, despite all noble corporate goals, a corporate culture could thrive in which even obvious misconduct and questionable management decisions could be accepted”.

The experts should report to the workforce on an ongoing basis.

Since mid-July, the auditors, the RBB compliance officer and an external law firm on behalf of the auditors and the board of directors have also been dealing with the nepotism and bonus system.

Suddenly there was competition for control of the RBB, whose misery also has something to do with the fact that the broadcasting council apparently had no influence and the administrative board let the resigned chairman Wolf regulate things alone with the director Schlesinger - in this way the committees leveraged themselves out.

The system only tipped over when someone gave information to the outside world.

But the Berlin House of Representatives still doesn't want to know all of this for sure.

As the "Tagesspiegel" reports, the demand by the CDU General Secretary Mario Czaja to set up a parliamentary committee of inquiry did not find a majority.

For the Berlin CDU boss Wegner, however, one thing is clear: "What must not exist is a higher broadcasting fee," he told the "Tagesspiegel".

Anyone who is still seriously talking about an increase in fees is “definitely out of place”.

Will this assessment get through to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which pushed through the last increase in contributions on constitutional complaints from ARD, ZDF and Deutschlandradio?