Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 2, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
A clarification in the Interstate Broadcasting Amendment Treaty that public-service broadcasters may not do everything with their billions in licence-fee revenue, particularly not publish an electronic press, is positively necessary in political and constitutional terms. The constant expansion of licence-fee-funded content on the Internet massively distorts competition to the detriment of private companies, especially newspaper and magazine publishers, which do not receive billions in support from licence-fee payers. Given the variety and quality of privately financed content, there is no need for a public-service Internet!
Limiting Internet texts to those that are “programme-related” is a necessity under European and competition law. It is downright absurd for the director-general of ZDF to describe entirely normal media-policy decisions as “censorship”. Such an accusation demeans all those who actually have to resist state censorship in dictatorships.
I assume that Markus Schächter does not seriously intend to maintain the accusation of “censorship” — the suppression of expression and a free press as practised in dictatorships — against German media policy. I therefore strongly advise him to tone down his choice of words.
Moreover, those responsible at ARD and ZDF have always stressed that their Internet offerings are in any case merely programme-accompanying and programme-related. For that reason alone, Schächter’s agitation is entirely incomprehensible.
