German politicians love their state broadcasters. State broadcasters' mandate is to provide inclusive news and entertainment, representing all sectors of the population.
Officially called "public broadcasters", these institutions are behemoths with an annual budget more or less as big as that of the American National Security Agency (depending on the Euro-Dollar exchange rate). With the exception of the international broadcaster, all German state broadcasters are run by the federal states, some cover more than one state, but even tiny states in the old West with just over half a million people hang on to their own broadcasting company. Complex inter-state agreements govern the the two nation-wide TV outfits ARD and ZDF. Each and every single "public" broadcaster is firmly in the hands of the governing political parties, with state prime ministers on the boards, with state parliaments setting the mandatory fee every household and company must pay. An "independent" commission determines the financial needs of the broadcasters, but hardly any German knows that the members of the commission are appointed by the state prime ministers by "preferably unanimous vote".
The population German state broadcasters have never represented in their long history is immigrants.
Nowadays, with satellite TV and radio and an easy 50 000 radio stations from around the world on a single website like TuneIn, you can argue that the need to cater to immigrants isn't there any more.
But go back to the 1960s and 70s, when millions of workers from Italy, Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Portugal were called in to fill the needs of German industry.
To the state broadcasters (there were no private ones back then), these workers only existed on the German news, just like the token black US military kids in Frankfurt and throughout the German South.
To listen to the radio in their own languages, these foreign workers had to make do with crackling AM or short wave from their home countries.
TV in their language was not available until satellite and cable. Newspapers, for quite some time, had to be trucked in, too.
German radio and TV was all white, and all German (with an exception for a couple of indigenous non-German tribes in the far north and the far east).
While US TV at the time was also run by white guys, there were offerings on public radio, and there still are today. Even in German.
So, when the blogster opened the web site of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this morning and saw "CSU for refugee television", there was a split second of hope. It was only a split second, though, because right next to it was "German integration broadcaster".
Since CSU is the ruling Bavarian conservative party, which sometimes makes Rand Paul look like a socialist, the article was predictable.
Presented by the CSU general secretary, a PhD light (not a fake one, but one that he can not legally use as 'Dr.' in many German states), the call really is for "integration TV". Offering refugees German language courses on TV is nice, kind of a no-brainer, were it not for the historical legacy of totally ignoring immigrants.
The other part is teaching the German constitution and German culture.
Basically Yodel TV with "How to drive safely", quipped the K-Landnews TheEditor, This whole integration thing is so much worse than what you go through as an immigrant to the US. German politicians see integration into society as ditching the culture you come from. That's moronic, leave that job to the children of immigrants.
And where does the money for Yodel TV come from?
German state broadcasters are sitting on a pile of frozen cash to the tune of 1.6 billion Euros. That's only half of the surplus they managed to collect when the new fee structure was introduced in 2013. The fee structure had been announced as "revenue neutral", if you need to know.
So, the state governments asked their parliaments to split the difference - give half to the broadcasters while reducing the citizens' fee by a few cents for a year or two, and put the other half into the bank for the next cycle of fees in 2017.
[Update 10/22/2015] Just in time for the post, another article in the same newspaper tells us that the international broadcaster DW signed a cooperation agreement with the domestic ARD broadcasters to get information to refugees. As of now, there is a refugee radio with various private and the Bavarian state broadcaster on air, and private TV broadcaster n-tv started the very first TV broadcast in Arabic on September 25.
This is a good start. It also makes the call by the CSU secretary general appear even more as creative meddling for political gain.
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