German Radio & TV fee protecting journos from working as spies?

We have had our share of trouble with the revamped German Radio & TV fee.

We have pointed out that German "public" media has a budget to rival that of the NSA (give or take a little, depending on the exchange rate).

We even put the amount into a graphic showing the budgets of the German federal departments and saw that the fee tops the majority of the budgets of government departments.

We have been smitten by the fact that trash collection has an opt-out for people who compost their veggie scraps. No questions asked, just tick a box. For the broadcast fee, no such option exists. The states and the courts claim: it is not possible to check whether you are watching public TV.
The trash collection folks shrug, yes, we cannot really check if you compost, but that's okay, a little bit of trust goes a long way.

We were riveted to Twitter and the internet when a couple of state supreme courts took the case of "tax versus fee" (a fee was legal, a tax would not have been legal).
They declared it a fee.
Amazingly, all the court decisions we have seen so far are so similar that only the use of MS Word text blocs can account for so much judicial harmony. Well, we may be soooo wrong on that, accept our preemptive apologies if we incorrectly blamed MS Word.

The end result is that you can be dirt poor and still be made to pay, because any exemption for normal working or non-working people is tied to social subsistence benefits.

Benefits you are not entitled to as a foreigner, except under very narrow circumstances. And, of course, if you receive such benefits, you won't get full permanent resident status in Germany.*

Why would an enlightened country like Germany be so unforgiving towards people who do not watch television or listen to German radio?

The penny (or cent) finally dropped, after a year of frustration. The slow motion drop of the penny was facilitated by a story written by Bob Woodward, of Watergate reporting fame. Mr. Woodward described how American media helped out the intelligence community either by sending faux reporters or by enlisting real ones to moonlight for the intelligence community.

It is easy to see the temptation for other countries to do the same, isn't it?

So, there we had the reason for the high license fee: the Germans do not want to tempt their public tv and radio folks to moonlight for the German foreign spy service! To eliminate this sort of temptation, they would treat their journalists exceedingly well. Which may cost a little more.

The German foreign intelligence service BND is not allowed to perform surveillance inside the country but it did in fact do some, hm, how to call this, work (?) covering some journalists. This newspaper article (in German)  gives an overview of activities from 1993 to the mid 2000s, and this other article (also in German) describes activities by the organization/its predecessor all the way back to the late 1940s.

So, we can safely assume that the BND prefers spying on reporters to employing German public radio and TV personnel working as foreign correspondents as sources or spies.  

If German journalists worked as spies, we would know about it, because German public radio and TV would definitely report on it as early as 30 or 40 years after the fact.

* The exact legal situation is in flux, there may be a widening of eligibility in the near future at least for EU citizens.