If you follow the most recent ARD press conference, the atmosphere in the network of stations is excellent.
The WDR director and acting ARD chairman Tom Buhrow is by nature not a grouch.
And his colleague Kai Gniffke from SWR, who will take over the ARD chairmanship at the turn of the year, is not easily shaken by anything.
The tidiness she demonstrated on Thursday after the last meeting of the directors seems a little strange.
Outside the door the world lies in ruins, but in the public service system life seems quite bearable.
Michael Hanfeld
responsible editor for feuilleton online and "media".
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Buhrow and Gniffke don't have much to say about the RBB scandal and what's happening at NDR.
Which can be explained insofar as the ARD is actually not a "group", as Buhrow says, and one broadcaster cannot look into the internal affairs of another.
At the height of the scandal, however, it was enough for a joint declaration of no confidence from all directors towards the RBB station management.
Now, one gets the impression that things should go back to normal.
One draws ARD-wide conclusions from the events at RBB, says Buhrow.
They are working on uniform compliance standards;
the rules that exist in the individual houses are being compared with each other.
Results should be available at the next directors' meeting in November.
There are “largely good structures”.
When asked, Buhrow reveals that the distrust of the management of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg is a thing of the "past", it was related to the transparency that RBB had created internally in ARD.
"That's done for us now."
The provisional ARD boss Buhrow is of course already aware that "fundamental questions" are being raised in view of the scandals.
The democratic society should say what it expects from public service broadcasting and what it doesn't want.
The financing is also a point of contention, you have to see these two things "honestly" together, says Buhrow.
But in the next breath, there is talk again of “resources becoming scarcer” and the workforce that is hit hard.
I beg your pardon?
The public broadcasters are not really short of money, they have more money than ever: 8.4 billion euros from the broadcasting fee plus more than a billion additional income.
The artistic directors, program directors and department heads are top earners in (quasi) public service.
Broadcasters can afford anything.
You can send 58 journalists to the CDU party conference and still be proud of it – like Kai Gniffke.
All of this in the certainty that the radio contribution will rise again in 2025, based on the inner logic of this system, no matter how the rest of the world is doing.
There is no waiver here.
As long as the broadcasters state their "financial requirements" and it is only checked whether this is consistent, there can be no less.
Unless politicians – in this case the state governments – would take into account the dimension that the public service system has now assumed.
The fact that Tom Buhrow, as he reveals at the press conference, has waived a salary increase when he was re-elected as artistic director and is transferring his additional income from supervisory board positions at subsidiaries back to WDR - a five-digit amount per year - is a personal honor to him.
But that doesn't change anything about the topic itself.
That's why the button falls out of your ear when the SWR director Gniffke, who worked for a long time as head of the newsroom ARD-aktuell, responds to the friendly final question, where he sees his mission, and from times when we don't know whether people will "get warm in the winter", farmers only plow dust because it's so dry and shops have to close because they can't find any employees.
You have to debate this, you shouldn't leave it to the algorithms of Tiktok or those from the USA.
"That's the role of ARD, that's my mission," says Gniffke.
At this moment we think to ourselves that the lights are still on in the ivory tower that we are all forced to finance lavishly.
And it's warm too.