Scandal shakes reputation of German public broadcasting
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This had never happened before in German public broadcasting. On Monday August 15, Patricia Schlesinger, steward since 2016 of the Berlin regional public broadcaster RBB, was immediately dismissed from her post, after an almost unanimous vote by the board of directors. Splattered in several cases revealed at the end of June by the site Business Insider, she had resigned, a few days earlier, from her post as director of the ARD, the association of the nine regional stations of the country – one of the three pillars, with the ZDF channel and the Deutschlandfunk radio, of the German public audiovisual . The scandal occurs at the worst time, while this system with complex structures is in full reform.
Patricia Schlesinger is accused of having abused the privileges given to her by her duties, without the supervisory authorities having intervened. The press revealed that, in addition to her salary of more than 300,000 euros per year, the former investigative journalist had benefited from copious “target bonuses” granted under conditions that are not very transparent.
Private dinners
She is also accused of having given private dinners at her home at the expense of her employer, of having ordered work worth 1.4 million euros on the floor of her office in Berlin, or to have taken advantage of a luxurious company sedan, equipped with massaging seats. Her husband, a converted former journalist, would have, for his part, obtained, thanks to his intervention, consulting assignments for the Berlin Congress Center, a public company co-directed by the chairman of the supervisory board of the regional channel RBB, Wolf-Dieter Wolf, who resigned on August 9. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation.
The German fee currently amounts to 18.36 euros per month per household, or 220.32 euros per year
The affair took on such proportions that Friedrich Merz, the president of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the first opposition party, publicly denounced the dysfunctions of public broadcasting revealed by the scandal. “The Schlesinger affair has the potential to permanently deprive public service broadcasting of its legitimacy and its acceptance by the public”, he warned in a column published on August 13. A serious warning shot for German public channels and radios, which have been criticized for several years for their structures often seen as redundant, too expensive or ill-suited to the current media landscape.
The stations, which must finance their transition to digital while traditional audiences are declining, have been on the defensive for several years. Witness the recent debate on the increase in the fee, which had taken on unprecedented proportions in 2020, when the president of the Saxony-Anhalt region, Reiner Haseloff, had blocked the increase of 86 centimes per month. It was only after a decision by the Constitutional Court that the reform was finally approved.
The German fee currently stands at 18.36 euros per month per household, or 220.32 euros per year (against 136 euros in France, before its abolition). In August 2021, a few weeks before taking office as head of the ARD, Patricia Schlesinger justified the increase in the contribution to public broadcasting by explaining to the magazine Der Spiegel : “Saving money is our daily life. »
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