Page 104 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

Chapter 4
Beyond balanced pluralism: broadcasting
in Germany*

Vincent Porter and Suzanne Hasselbach

By the end of the 1970s, the established duopoly of public broadcasters
1
in the Federal Republic of Germany was under attack by the political
parties of the right. The trouble flared up in the CDU-governed Länder
of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, where their respective
Ministerpräsidenten, Ernst Albrecht and Gerhard Stoltenberg, found
themselves unable to control the current affairs output of the Hamburg-
based ARD station, NDR, which was set up by an inter-Land treaty
signed between Hamburg and their two Länder. In 1977, under a CDU
majority, the NDR administrative council used its extremely wide-
ranging powers to rule that NDR’s report on the proposed nuclear
power station at Brokdorf was contrary to its constitution. So too was its
transmission on its third programme, together with RB, SFB and WDR,
of the thirteen-part series Der Betriebsrat (the Works Council), which
the West German Employers Association considered too leftist.
Incensed by this decision, the NDR director-general, Martin Neuffer,
appealed to the Hamburg Administrative Court that the broadcasting
council’s ruling was ultra vires. He won his case. Stoltenberg’s and
Albrecht’s next move was to announce their Länder’s withdrawal from
the NDR Treaty, to come into effect in 1980. Both Ministerpräsidenten
not only objected to the supposedly leftist reporting, but also wanted
more regionalization and, importantly, saw a chance to set up private,
fully commercial stations. But the courts prevented the break-up of
NDR. This time it was the Federal Administrative Court in West Berlin
which put a stop to the politicians’ interference.
2

THE LURE OF NEW TECHNOLOGY
Initially, the SPD/FDP federal government introduced cable and
satellite in response to the economic crises that had begun in 1967 and
which led to inflation and marked unemployment in the early 1970s. But