WDR Broadcasting Council: On course towards the storm

The slashing and stabbing, as was particularly expected from the newspapers of the Springer group ("crisis meeting", "power struggle"), did not materialize at the 646th meeting of the WDR Broadcasting Council.

The doyen of critical dialogue, the FDP politician Gerhart Baum, who sits on the Broadcasting Council for the North Rhine-Westphalia Cultural Council, could have ensured this cultivated course by speaking at the beginning of the meeting in the Stiftersaal of the Wallraff-Richartz Museum.

He doesn't expect a "power struggle," Baum said, but there is definitely a "fight to be fought": "between those who want to reform and defend the public broadcasting system" and those who are aiming at clear-cutting.

There is an urgent need to develop a "forward strategy" following the Broadcasting Commission's recent decisions of January 20 in order to:

"There was a horizon of expectations built up against us", which could only be countered with an ambitious reform plan of your own and your own public relations work.

Most of the council's internal critics were now able to find themselves on the side of the defenders;

It was accordingly civilized, but quite heated in the matter.

As heated as seldom even.

For a long time, broadcasting councilors looked pale and inconspicuous.

Günter Jauch mocked them in 2006 as "committees full of gremlins" (they quickly paved the way for the presenter to return to ARD; Jauch then failed on his own in public broadcasting).

Sometimes, and not always without justification, they are called “Abnickvereine” (particularly after what happened in the RBB).

And yet it seems as if the supervisory bodies of the broadcasters, which are made up of around a third of delegates from the political parties, the rest with socially representative representatives, and which are responsible for monitoring compliance with the statutory broadcasting mandate, are increasingly becoming the stage for the debate about the future of public legal broadcasting - not least because its meetings are public with small exceptions.

The directors have to answer questions about the program before this committee.

The members and a number of viewers awaited the report by WDR director Tom Buhrow, top 3 on the agenda, with great anticipation.

A lot has accumulated in the last few days at WDR.

This goes far beyond the usual program complaints, two of which were also dealt with in detail (the Broadcasting Council did not agree with either of them), and concerns fundamental questions.

After all, it doesn't happen every day that one's own members send an incendiary letter to the director that has been leaked to the public in advance via the media.

In this case, the members sent by the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament for the CDU did it: NRW Vice-Chairman Gregor Golland, the state parliament deputies Florian Braun and Jan Heinisch as well as the former deputies Kirstin Korte and Petra Vogt.

In particular, they criticize the "tolerance" of the "tirades" of the satirist Jean-Philipp Kindler, who works freelance for WDR and who, after the New Year's Eve riots and the corresponding migration debate, wrote on his private Instagram account about "radicalization" and "incitement" against the " Shit party” called the CDU.

The WDR had not taken a position on the content.

The letter also complains about the case of the comedian Moritz Neumeier, who made unsuccessful pedophilia jokes in his program “Lustig”, which WDR cut from the program after it became known.

The CDU members were also given too little information about a heavy rain front, but too much about the protests in Lützerath.

Another contentious topic that is not entirely new has recently come onto the agenda.

It was said in advance in various media that the debate about the relationship between the new “hard but fair” moderator Louis Klamroth and Luisa Neubauer, the main protagonist of the youth climate movement, should be taken up again in this session.

Here, too, it was Jan Heinisch who unpacked the biggest gun, the possible “self-consciousness” of the moderator.

For this reason, every “little local politician” has to disclose who he is in a relationship with.

Maybe the compliance rules of the WDR weren't enough.