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Eroded landscape: The ARD management is sometimes clumsy
Photo: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand / picture alliance / dpa
This is probably called climate diplomacy: over a year ago, the "Climate Before Eight Initiative" asked ARD in an online petition to broadcast a regular program in the style of "Exchange before eight" on the climate crisis before the "Tagesschau".
The network of broadcasters reacted hesitantly, but took up talks with the group.
It has now become known that the dialogue has apparently finally failed.
"A regular climate format at prime time does not seem to be possible with ARD at the moment," the initiative said in a press release.
"We would have liked more foresight and courage from the public broadcasters."
After all, ARD program director Christine Strobl assured that in future once a week at "a quarter to eight" the topics of climate and biodiversity will be addressed.
A kind of diplomatic minimum concession that makes the “Klima vor Acht” initiative only partially happy: “The television landscape has to reinvent itself in parts in order to cope with this unprecedented crisis in the media,” says the merger's statement.
"We will continue to remind ARD and all other broadcasters of this and will be happy to support them with our expertise."
ARD is currently receiving expertise, support and good advice from all sides.
To be more precise: The institution is under fire like seldom before.
Petitions and open letters sometimes reach the program directorate in Munich every hour.
They come from working interest groups, but also increasingly from our own company.
Fear of the "death zone"
It was only on Monday that a group of employees from the field of ARD political magazines such as »Panorama« and »Monitor« turned to the program managers led by ARD frontwoman Strobl to object to the planned media library-compatible conversion of the formats. A little later, correspondents and ex-correspondents of the house sent an appeal to the same address to withdraw the proposed postponement of the "Weltspiegel" from early Sunday evening to Monday night.
The signatories of the paper, which is available to SPIEGEL, include public figureheads such as Sonia Seymour-Mikich, Claus Kleber and Thomas Roth. You see the traditional format pushed into the »death zone« of the ARD program. "Death zone" is a term that comes up again and again when the broadcasting network is concerned with shifting broadcasting slots. The staff seems to have little confidence in the program management of their management.
The fact that the protest is piling up and the objection is being presented more and more drastically has to do with the fact that ARD is about to undergo what is probably the largest renovation in its history. Among other things, the house is intended to appeal to younger target groups who are used to streaming. At the moment, the Prime Ministers are discussing an amendment to the State Treaty, which should regulate the powers of public law. Essentially, it is about enabling ARD and ZDF to react more flexibly to the requirements of digitization and the increasingly segmented television market. A vote is to be taken in autumn.
The structural reforms that have now been launched are already taking up the idea of flexibilization by readjusting the relationship between linearly broadcast content and media library filling.
This leads to the new distribution struggles and strategy debates - which are actually not always moderated skillfully by those responsible.
A hot autumn threatens the ARD, for which the house is apparently not prepared.
RTL as a climate saver?
How clumsy the ARD management sometimes acts was also shown in dealing with the "climate before eight" mentality.
While this urgent socio-political issue was being appeased endlessly, the private competition from RTL made nails and introduced a “climate update” at the beginning of July, which is now to be broadcast twice a week.
The new format that RTL is presenting with the company's own »Geo« partners is part of a quality offensive with which the German private broadcasters are attacking the previous information sovereignty of the public broadcasters.
In this context, ARD lost the »Tagesschau« spokeswoman Linda Zervakis to ProSieben and the »Tagesthemen« presenter Pinar Atalay to RTL.
The private sector is currently managing to present itself as a new guarantee of quality, while the ARD seems to be groaning after the demands of the times.
So RTL can now act as a climate saver without much investment.
It would be easy to make the new private competition look pale.
The RTL update sometimes looks like a somewhat unkind meteorological broadcast for older Baltic Sea vacationers.
Why isn't ARD taking its proclaimed hunt for the U-40 audience seriously - and presenting a clever, modern climate format right in front of the »Tagesschau«? They could hardly build a larger lighthouse in the linear program in order to attract a young, climate-minded audience.
