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ZDF director Thomas Bellut calls the merger with ARD pointless

2021-04-07T10:41:33.062Z


Thomas Bellut thinks nothing of an association of public broadcasters. The broadcasters should deliver a quality competition, says the ZDF director.


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ZDF director Bellut

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Christoph Hardt / imago images / Future Image

ARD and ZDF under one roof?

According to ZDF director Thomas Bellut, this reform proposal for public broadcasting is simply not feasible because of the different functions of ARD and ZDF.

The ZDF has a national mandate, the ARD is a working group of important regional broadcasters with a chair that changes every two years, Bellut told the newspapers of the VRM group in Mainz.

The director sees "no market or business sense" in an association.

Bellut also emphasized: "I am a clear advocate of a quality competition for the main programs of ZDF and ARD." Diversity of opinion must be preserved and not restricted without necessity, said Bellut, who will stop as ZDF director in March 2022.

The proposal to merge ARD and ZDF has been taken up again and again in the past, most recently by the SME Union of CDU and CSU, which therefore consider broadcasting to be too fragmented, too expensive and too redundant in its structures.

The debate was recently led under the impression of the dispute over the increase in the broadcasting fee, which the state of Saxony-Anhalt had stopped contrary to the position of all other federal states.

Media policy is essentially a country issue.

In the Broadcasting Commission, the federal states are currently pushing their plans to reform the mandate and structure of public broadcasting, also with a view to saving potential.

sak / dpa

Source: spiegel

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