by Peter Löcke //
It's just as you think
A couple copulating in the toilet of a pub. Not exactly a romantic place for such pleasure. Meanwhile, a waitress in the next cubicle is enjoying her cigarette break. She takes note of the lustful moans of the couple next door with a grin. Then, in the heat of the sexual moment, Don Juan drops the bunch of keys from his lowered trousers. Now the waitress is no longer grinning, because her partner's bunch of keys is lying down there on the cold tiles. She climbs onto the toilet, looks over the thin partition wall, looks her husband, who has been caught in flagrante delicto, straight in the eye and sarcastically asks him to introduce her to the lady. The response from the man played by Til Schweiger to his wife played by Katja Riemann is absurd.
"It's not what you think. I can explain everything to you."
It is a scene from the 1994 film "Der bewegte Mann" (The Moving Man). The bizarre reaction is remarkably reminiscent of the reactions of public broadcasters after regular journalistic cheating. As reliably as ARD and ZDF are caught with their pants down by viewers, the weak attempts at explanation are just as reliable.
"Dear viewer and fee payer. It's not what you think. I can explain everything to you."
What did the latest escapade and the subsequent statements look like? A WDR team asks a supposedly random citizen strolling in the Penny, who happens to be a WDR production assistant, for her opinion on climate surcharges. A journalistic no-go. The WDR explanation for this? Due to the deafening noise in the store, there was a communicative misunderstanding, so that the mistake went unnoticed. The mistake also went unnoticed because of the hectic production schedule. After all, there was half a day between the recording and the broadcast of the Tagesschau. Purely by chance, the WDR employee interviewed by WDR announced the political message desired by WDR and, purely by chance, the name of the "citizen" interviewed was shown incorrectly on TV. Hanna or Hannah Mertens? No matter.
"Dear viewer and fee payer. It was all very stupid. It was an unfortunate chain of circumstances and coincidences. It's not what you think. I can explain everything to you."
I would like to believe WDR editor-in-chief Stephan Brandenburg's spontaneous attempts at justification. But this exception has long since become the rule. There is a long chain of such unfortunate concatenation stories. Some, but by no means all, of these stories from the "strange coincidences" section have been published by the NZZ in a wonderful article listed. In this article, the author Alexander Kissler expresses himself cautiously and does not call for the dissolution of public broadcasting like others, but merely for an urgently needed new start. He criticizes the missionary proselytizing of the ÖRR and its politically one-sided ideology. The NZZ journalist avoids using a word that is equivalent to these accusations. And yet this word appears between every line.
Propaganda.
Propaganda is the systematic dissemination of political, ideological or similar ideas and opinions with the aim of influencing the general consciousness in a certain way. This is the official definition.
How does a large institution under attack react to accusations of this magnitude with a little distance? With a perpetrator-victim reversal. Remember: the judge's seat is better cushioned than the dock.
"There are a handful, maybe even two handfuls of accounts that consistently scan [ÖRR journalistic content] (...) in order to construct a scandal out of it if possible (...). If this scandal triggers a corresponding reflex on social media, we also know that certain publishers want to ride this wave. And then, of course, these publishers rely on this clickbaiting (...). It's a well-functioning business model."
This is the opinion of the editor-in-chief of ARD-aktuell and Tagesschau, Marcus Bornheim told Deutschlandfunk radio, on the accusations.
I would like to disagree with Marcus Bornheim on several points. The coincidences, scandals and political bias in the reporting are obvious to everyone, even without scanning. They are not contrived. They exist and are named. The ÖRR must now be scanned for balanced, critical journalism. It is not the person who uncovers a crime who is to blame, but the person who commits it. Dismissing criticism of the ÖRR in general as a business model is a common and transparent killer argument to insinuate that critics are only interested in money.
ÖRR can explain everything to the viewer? It's not what the viewer thinks? Yes, it is. The public emperor stands there with his pants down. Bare-chested with reliably absurd justifications. Caught red-handed like Til Schweiger as a man on the move. In flagrante delicto.
Of course, the movie comparison is a little off. Katja Riemann kicked her cheating partner out of the apartment they shared. ÖRR, on the other hand, continues to hold the keys and charges just under 20 euros a month for every German apartment. This is the state-guaranteed business model.
Articles identified by name do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the publisher.
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7 Responses
The movie comparison is a wonderfully apt and at the same time extremely elegant, almost gracefully limping comparison and "business model" is the appropriate term for the vast majority of management positions in the ÖRR. Bingo, Mr. Löcke!
The fact that you cannot escape the broadcasting fee and, according to current case law, it doesn't matter whether you can prove that you use public media or not, we should call it by its name. It is a broadcasting tax, nothing else. The state uses this tax to pay for the dissemination of the desired narrative. If the state wanted censorship and propaganda, it could, couldn't it? Especially if we could identify weaknesses in the democratic control of the government by parliament and the judiciary, possibly. So if at some point this impression were to arise in large parts of the population, legitimacy would no longer be what it used to be. Let's take a look.
You hit the nail on the head: The broadcasting fee is a TAX! What's more, it is a poll tax that makes a mockery of the welfare state principle of Article 20 and of left-wing or even Christian ideals. After it was introduced, there were also corresponding expert opinions, both in terms of tax law and economics, which confirmed its status as a tax. Hopefully, most people still know that a certain Mr. Paul Kirchhof, a former judge at the Federal Constitutional Court, invented the incorrectly named "contribution" tax and that a certain Mr. Ferdinand Kirchhof, as a brother and active judge at the Federal Constitutional Court, mercilessly and shamelessly rejected the numerous challenges in the last instance through the legal channels provided for. As a result, the institution of this constitutional body, in which I had previously placed great trust, rapidly declined in my reputation for the first time. As is well known, the coronavirus crisis took us a considerable step further down this path of the rule of law.
The fact that we are all being forced to watch the left-wing green forced feed from the ÖRR by a law passed in the Bundestag and confirmed by the Federal Constitutional Court is a scandal of the first order. In the meantime, many facts, opinions, etc. and reality in general are being deliberately and maliciously withheld from viewers on ÖRR. Editorial networks and fact-checkers do the rest. You don't have to be an AfD fan to find this information or rather manipulation behavior by ARD and ZDF completely unacceptable.
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One example:
In March 2019, climate researcher Prof. Bjorn Stevens from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg gave SPIEGEL an in-depth insight into the possibilities, but also the limits, of climate research (see SPIEGEL report: "A new strategy": https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/eine-neue-strategie-a-a02f41a5-0002-0001-0000-000163040341). The statements allow only one conclusion: the climate simulations, which are always so highly praised, do not allow any statement to be made about the climate sensitivity of CO2 due to a lack of detail. This means that the proof of the CO2 thesis based on the observed global warming is lost in the realm of speculation. The fact that mankind is responsible for global warming could therefore also have another cause. It is fitting that only six months after the publication of the SPIEGEL report, Prof. Stevens responded to my simple question as to why there is no reference to so-called "global terrestrial stilling" in the IPCC reports with the written admission that he had "never thought about it before". This is all the more astonishing as it is easy to estimate on the basis of known physical relationships, such as evaporation capacity, proportion of terrestrial evaporation, dependence between wind and evaporation, that the cooling capacity of the earth's surface due to the global decrease in terrestrial winds that has been going on for decades could correspond approximately to the same specific heat output per square meter of the earth's surface that is attributed to the so-called radiative forcing of greenhouse gases. In addition, and particularly interestingly, the current phase of global warming and global stilling began at roughly the same time: the 1960s (see https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1025144887954497536?lang=de and https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/stilling-global-wind-speeds-slowing-1960)
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ARD and ZDF, as well as large sections of the press, know this process in detail. Why do they report on every segregation of people like Greta or Luisa, but not on this memorable event? One can only speculate. Those responsible in the editorial offices probably quickly realized that Stilling as the cause of man-made climate change and the large-scale use of wind energy were absolutely incompatible. They would have to renounce their own ideology, i.e. the local, decentralized energy turnaround based on wind and solar power, which has been sold for several years as having no alternative. This is all the more true as the scientific assessment of the consequences of wind energy by wind energy-related research is based on a physical error. It is not without reason that both the Max Planck Society and the Academy of Sciences refuse to answer the following crucial question, which has been publicly called for on several occasions: https://twitter.com/RoHeAss/status/1685878986323247104. These withheld insights are all the more critical given that the consequences have long since become visible, if one wants to see them at all: https://twitter.com/RoHeAss/status/1679760029384073217
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As you can see, not everything is as the TV editors, but also the remaining ÖRR fans - mainly supporters of the Greens, SPD & Co - believe (or want to believe). But we already know this from the reporting on the corona measures. Everyone involved is carrying on with the panic program as if nothing had happened. Corona has been seamlessly replaced by omnipotent climate change, which of course explains any deviation of the weather from the norm.
Apart from the Sunday thriller, it's the same for me. Even men don't need supervised thinking and dumb TV:-) For several years now, I've always waited until shortly before foreclosure to pay my fees. But I never pay the full amount. The letter always states so threateningly that the entire amount, including all reminder fees, must be paid immediately to avoid further measures. But nothing happens. If a sum is credited to the account, the sluggish system just starts all over again. In the meantime, I only receive so-called assessment notices anyway. I haven't yet dared to take the final step of foreclosure. But at least it keeps the "propaganda ministry" busy. It's true, of course, that if nobody or "only" a majority stops paying, this system will collapse. I'm sure many people would like to do that, but good old fear is certainly too big a hurdle.
Yes, there is hardly a better way to describe what is on offer. I'm annoyed every quarter that I have to pay the compulsory fee, because the fact is - I don't watch anything anymore. A woman doesn't need supervised thinking and dumbed-down TV. I have already rehearsed the uprising with the fees several times, emails for queries are answered by post weeks later in a way that speaks for itself. Since Germany is now so divided into very different opinions, there is no getting around it. It would only help if nobody paid any more. Well, I think that will simply never happen.
But, but, of course it's not like that. With Till S., my wife liked the ass better, I liked the horny girl better. I don't like anything about ÖRR Tv. I'm just angry and pissed off. Especially because I have to put up with it helplessly and pay for propaganda.