First collect the fee and then report critically? That will not do!

You can earn good money with the federal government if you are a journalist. In the past five years, according to the government's response to a small inquiry by the AfD parliamentary group, the federal ministries have spent a total of almost 1.5 million euros to give media representatives taxpayer money orders. In most cases, the ministries and the chancellery invited the journalists to moderate events for a fee, there were also orders for "media training for executives", workshops or participation in panel discussions.

The list does not show how much the journalists earned in detail for these assignments - with one exception: ProSieben presenter Linda Zervakis, as can be seen from the table, earned almost 11,000 euros with an order from the Chancellery in November 2022.

All of this raises questions. First of all, why do ministries have to spend taxpayers' money on journalists at all - when they employ press officers who have often previously worked for newspapers or TV stations themselves and who should therefore be able to moderate panel discussions and award ceremonies?

And then this: Why do media professionals allow themselves to be influenced by money from those about whom they should report critically? After all, anyone who allows a ministry to pay them – regardless of whether it’s several thousand euros for an assignment, as in the case of Zervakis, or just a few hundred – can hardly claim to be able to look at the respective house with an unbiased mind the next time to be able to

But there is something else that stands out in particular about the information from the federal government about the journalists' commissions: representatives of the public media authorities received such commissions much more frequently than their colleagues from private media companies. The overhang was particularly large in the Ministry of Economics and Energy led by Robert Habeck (Greens). Both sides are not doing themselves any favours: They are feeding those critics who claim that the traffic light government and the public broadcasters are in the same boat.