Germany’s massive public broadcasting media has a budget of €6.9 billion and 22,612 employees. The budget comes primarily from a licence fee which every household, company and public institution are required by law to pay. For an ordinary household the fee is currently €17.50 per month.
ARD logo since 2019. Public domain image
But over the years, criticism of unbalanced reporting has become increasingly loud. Many citizens would be happy to do away with the mandatory fees, citing onesidedness in ARD reporting.
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Volunteers at ARD vote 92% Socialist, Communist or Green
By Die kalte Sonne
(Text translated, edited by P. Gosselin)
According to Wikipedia, Germany’s public broadcasting has a variety of tasks:
In addition to a basic service mandate and a legally defined program mandate, one of the other essential tasks of public service broadcasting is therefore to maintain political and economic independence.”
Thus, independence and distance from the state are supposed to be a fundamental principle by the publicly funded broadcasters. According to an article in Meedia. Volunteers were asked about their political preferences and the pendulum swung strongly in the direction of green and red. Even the flagship daily FAZ did an article on the topic.
Volunteers at ARD and Deutschland Radio were asked about their political preferences. According to the study, 57.1 percent of the volunteers said they would vote for the Greens, 23.4 percent for Die Linke (former communists) and about 11 percent for the SPD Socialists. The center-right CDU/CSU would get only 3% of the votes among ARD volunteers.”
Of course it would be wrong to conclude that mostly greens and communists would be covering stories if these volunteers were ever to come into the normal operation of the stations at some point. Normally journalists are supposed to be critical and independent despite their party preferences.
However, this is rarely the case. The topic of climate and energy is certainly one of them. The rare reports on, for example, the negative consequences of the transition to renewable energies, are more the exception rather than the rule. Will such exceptions become even rarer in the future? It looks more as if the homogenization of reporting on the topic of climate is making great strides.
A survey of US media shows the same. Even Fox has capitulated. But we know the media for what they are :
When Giuliani asked a reporter this week which Agency, they all simply laughed out loud hearing “CNN”.
The lesson is the entire transatlantic media is in lockstep. Some are trying to cancel the BBC fee, too.
Add in Big Tech, Twitter, Google, Facebook censorship, and the new British Internet Harms bill, and think empire.
The coming Great Reset of the Davos Crowd, will be gushingly reported by ARD, ZDF, SWR, NWR, SWR3 , BBC, NPR, CNN, WaPo.
Why? It means a $100 trillion green digital tsunami.
They have not checked what a tsunami actually means.
In Canada the CBC can top that statistic.
I think they’re all attention seekers. If they don’t have something to say they just make things up.
If a person reported from a skeptical viewpoint ..
.. would that person be a volunteer for long?
You can add Australia’s ABC to the list of green/left publicly funded ($1.3B per year) broadcasters. Despite a charter that requires it to be unbiased in terms of diversity of ideas and opinions presented, almost everything broadcast from its capital city radio and TV outlets is overwhelmingly and unashamedly green/left biased.
Our would be “conservative” federal government prefers to turn a blind eye to the ABC’s flouting of its charter, this despite continuing wide spread public complaints about it.
The charter is something written on paper. Their real inside Charter is to tell people what to think.
Yes Pierre, their ABC is nominally run by a board of directors but in reality it is the staff collective, comprised overwhelmingly far left green activist types, that runs the place. The ABC does not have a single conservative presenter in any of its mainstream programs.
So effectively half the population must contribute to the taxes that lavishly fund the organisation, while in return these people are totally disenfranchised.
Um, did the term ‘volunteers’ in this post and in the underlying sources mean that they volunteered to respond to the survey, or that they were unpaid volunteers rather than paid employees at ARD? There is a whole world of difference in the importance of the survey results, depending on which of these two meanings was intended. Can anyone answer this?
People who volunteered to work at ARD
Um, did the term ‘volunteers’ in this post and in the underlying sources mean that they volunteered to respond to the survey, or that they were unpaid volunteers rather than paid employees at ARD? There is a whole world of difference in the importance of the survey results, depending on which of these two meanings was intended. Can anyone answer this?
Here in Australia I have no doubt the ABC would eclipse this figure. And they are showered with over AUD$1 billion per year to produce Green Left rubbish which only 30% of the country identify with.
They even get to vote on their own pay rises! And of course, during the covid time they had to get a pay rise whilst so many private businesses were collapsed by the policies totally pushed by the ABC.
Complete farce.