Of bad radio and bad food

Our involuntary immersion into the grosser points of "public" radio and TV in Germany led us to food.

Not food for thought, the physical stuff served on plates and in bowls, the food called chow by some, delicacies by others.

While bad radio and bad food both can have adverse health effects, the relationship is deeper on an organizational level. Not the too many cooks idiom, please...

Once upon a time, there was a canteen in a large industrial facility. A young worker, fresh off the boat, was taken around by a chaperone to learn the layout.

This is the canteen, the food is pretty bad and expensive, too. 

Oh.

It will be a lot better starting next week, for about a month or so. The contract is up for renewal, and the executives will start to show up and have lunch there. So, the contractor is serving good food.

This is not the first time?

It happens every April, and once they have the extension, the executives have their lunch somewhere else and the quality of the canteen food goes back to crap.

We, the holier than thou and self-proclaimed smart people at the K-Landnews, believe we have seen something similar in Germany in the controversy about the Radio and TV License fee.

A bloated, overpaid organization ramping up its PR effort and going all out to get some sort of scoop in order to show the politicians how wonderful German public broadcasting is. Well worth its "barely adequate" public funding of some 10 billion dollars a year.

Note that one of those politicians wrote a news article the other day about how the bulk collection of all communications metadata is absolutely necessary in the face of the "gigantic" damages of 5 billion dollars a year cybercrime inflicts on the German economy.

And so it goes, the intellectual fast food served by German public TV is passed off as marvelous, and most people swallow like the baby birds swallow the regurgitated food served by their parents.