SPD senator believes in an end to public TV stations within ten years

Media politician Carsten Brosda (SPD) has called for a fundamental debate on the future of the public service system. Society must be clear about how it wants to communicate in the future, said the Hamburg media senator on Friday at the annual conference of the Recherche network in Hamburg. However, public service broadcasting should not become an "alternative area for content that cannot be financed privately".

Public broadcasting has "no feeling, no story for itself," criticized Brosda, who is a trained journalist himself. He said that broadcasters must be able to decide for themselves how they want to reach their audience in the future, and that this should not be dictated by politics. He himself believes that in ten years there will no longer be any public service broadcasters, but there will be public service offers on the Internet: "For this we need a definition of public service quality and for this we also need different bodies."

The green media politician Tabea Rößner said that opinion formation is now mainly taking place online. Public broadcasters should therefore be able to reach their audience on the Internet. In this context, she criticized the fact that the federal states were sticking to the ban on “press similarity” for public online offers. This is in the media state treaty "because the publishers have lobbied hard for it".

The editor-in-chief of "Bild" (like WELT belongs to Axel Springer SE), Johannes Boie, criticized that the public service system was a "drastic danger for private media in this country". He also spoke out against cooperation between publishers and public broadcasters. This is "an illegitimate cross-subsidization of private providers and a crazy distortion of competition," he said.

NDR director Joachim Knuth, who was recently confronted with internal and external allegations against his station in Hamburg and Kiel, countered that many regional publishers would like to cooperate with the public broadcasters because they cannot afford the production of expensive videos could. He appealed to the publishers: "Let's strengthen quality journalism in this country together."