Journalists on state payroll

Are federal ministries allowed to award contracts to journalists? In principle, this should not be a problem. After all, ministries also need from time to time the help of professionally trained journalists to fulfil their tasks. Accordingly, it should not be surprising if, for example, a journalist is hired for an event - for the event organizers need a moderator who knows his or her job. It can also be quite right to rely on the help of a journalist for video production and many a workshop.

However, such assignments become problematic when they multiply - especially for one person. And this is especially a problem when those assignments concern public journalists who are actually obliged to remain independent of the state. For example, the federal government has spent almost 1.5 million euros on commissions to journalists over the last five years – whereby a significantly higher part was spent on public service journalists.

The sum may not seem much at first glance. But this case reveals a deeper problem that also goes far beyond Germany's borders: how credible is the journalism of the public broadcasters? And how transparent is the whole affair if the AfD's enquiry that revealed this process is only inadequately answered - because it anonymises the journalists and their exact salaries? Is not the state rather protecting here its own system of favours with which it binds journalists to itself?

For some time, Germany has experienced a strange discourse, which assumes that government criticism is no longer the central concern of the press. Instead, the focus has shifted to expressing the right “Haltung” (moral-political attitude). In the course of these discussions, the representatives of the “attitude”-line threw into the round that the mission of government criticism was antiquated. It stemmed, they said, from a time when the "fourth estate" had to serve as an advocate because democracy did not exist, or was simply very inadequate. With democratisation and liberalisation, however, this claim is no longer valid, because now it is precisely this democracy - i.e. the state - and its achievements that must be defended.

Such criticism overlooks the central position of a pioneering thinker in relation to democratic theory and the positioning of the role of the press in democracy. This is Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville did not write about monarchy, but about democracy in America, and deliberately emphasised that a press is a corrective not in monarchy, but precisely in democracy. A corrective, by the way, without which democracy easily perverts into the tyranny of the majority.

Tocqueville notes that in a monarchy or aristocracy there are always particularisms that cannot be destroyed by the will of the majority. Individual nobles are independent because of their positions and can take their own stands. Even the king is not dependent on the wishes of a majority, but can maintain independence because of his own position. In a society, however, where public opinion counts for everything, the press has to be active because otherwise the minorities will be crushed under the power of the majority.

The fact that the press today prefers to elevate some opinion to the status of public opinion, and thus also crushes political minorities, is a separate matter. For Tocqueville, the priority was the idea that a political minority could no longer assert its interests or political ideals in a society determined by majorities. That is why the press is needed: it gives the individual a means of defence against the many, a minority against the majority.

The payment of supposedly non-state journalists by the state must be seen against this background. For it is doubtful whether there is any distance from the state if the state entices journalists with alimony. The real culprit is therefore not even the journalist, but the state. As a “cold monster”, it tries to subordinate an independent power. It should therefore come as no surprise that journalists from various private media have made their colleagues' mistake public and criticised it, knowing that their own credibility is also at stake. The public broadcasters, who have been suspected of “court reporting” in Germany for quite some time, have been completely silent about their own failure, their own involvement, and their own part in the erosion of the corrective.

Public broadcasting was barely just emerging from its most recent scandal: Last year, it became known that the board of a state broadcaster was regularly awarding itself bonuses. This was only the tip of the iceberg of public money waste and obvious favouritism over which the then director Patricia Schlesinger fell. Yet at the same time, she was only dismissed as a useful scapegoat in order to enable all other players to systematically ignore the abuses that had been going on in the broadcasters for years. For anyone who is even remotely at home in the liberal - not even conservative - spectrum, being exposed to the pedagogical and political programme of public broadcasting has degenerated into an ordeal. Though the public broadcaster still continues to claim being an honest 1970es‘ style quality medium, even the news reports within the legendary German “Tagesschau” (evening news) do not only display obviously false reports, but even technical errors – most evident by the use of erroneous grammar.

This public broadcasting institution which destroys the democratic corrective like hardly any other ironically calls the mandatory fee to be paid by all citizens to finance its activity  a “democracy levy”. Not for the first time, the broadcasters have claimed that, should there be no more public broadcasting service in Germany, a return of National Socialism is de facto inevitable. And as if the taxpayer were not already harmed enough by the current economic crisis, there are already serious plans to increase the monthly media fee to up to 25 euros. Currently, all Germans pay a little more than 18 euros to finance their “educational” broadcasting institutions.

The fact that, of all things, public journalists close to the government are also getting additional assignments, feeds the image of a self-service shop that has long since degenerated into a side branch of the federal government and sweeps away even the last vestiges of trust in an independent media landscape. The event is therefore only one piece of a larger mosaic. Whoever asks the ministries for names and funds, however, encounters ironclad secrecy. “Data protection is important.” After an enquiry by the magazine “Tichys Einblick”, the Ministry of Defence was forced to admit that there was a special contract with a very well-known presenter of the second German television programme (ZDF), but exactly because of this contract the payment could not be quoted.

To sum up, the above means that in a public ministry, there are ongoing debates whether disclosing the existence of a contract with a TV presenter is more or less important than respecting the democratic right of the parliament and the press to receive an answer to perfectly legitimate questions asked by members of the Bundestag or in press enquiries. This is the state of the supposed “separation of state and public broadcasters” in the Germany of 2023.

The fact that journalists accepted assignments from the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) also belongs to this context. While the ministries at least disclosed financial totals and employment categories, as well as enumerated journalists (encoded anonymously), the federal government blocked any information related to the German foreign intelligence service. Even the indication of the total sum that the BND had spent on journalist assignments was classified by the federal government as "endangering the welfare of the state". Depending on the interpretation of that answer, this could actually be true…