The journalist’s job is to go and ask. And at Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg, one could almost have forgotten that these days, there was not only one director who was caught up in a tangle of accusations and who had now resigned. But a great many journalists and program makers who send TV, radio and online reports into the country every day. For a special on Patricia Schlesinger’s resignation, the RBB sent a television team to the in-house elevator, where the button with the 13 was pressed. Schlesinger’s now notorious executive floor on Berlin’s Masurenallee was the place to go.
“Has it in these rooms, like that picture– Newspaper reported that there were actually expenses for luxury and pomp, at the expense of the fee payer?” asks the speaker from the off. The camera pans about ecologically high-quality parquet from Italy, about gray seating areas and the automatic wall greening, and once again succeeds in what journalism often achieves by looking: bitter disenchantment. No gold, no ivory, at most maybe elevated German office aesthetics. The fact that investments were made in this office landscape while savings had to be made on the station’s programming is terrible in many respects. And the interior and conversion may have been expensive, but when you think of luxury and pomp you only imagine something really exciting.
What is remarkable, however, is the seriousness with which journalists in the RBB take care of the allegations in their own house. About moderator Sarah Oswald, who in the evening show hosted the RBB program director Jan-Schulte Kellinghaus. Kellinghaus said there that he was met with “a wave of incomprehension, anger and indignation” in a switch among RBB employees on Monday. Oswald wanted to know from him what he had actually noticed as part of the management – and then made it clear in his half self-critical, half evasive remarks: “It’s not easy for us to set up a report because this transparency, which you promises – they don’t exist.” And then another unpleasant moment: Kellinghaus had to admit – in an RBB television studio full of editors and cameramen who are directly affected – that Patricia Schlesinger also received bonuses for achieving savings targets in the station.
The series of allegedly invited guests raises more and more questions – but the RBB has so far kept the list under wraps
It was also painful for Patricia Schlesinger’s defensive line in a completely different place. Because so far she had insisted that the dinners billed via the RBB with “multipliers” in her private apartment were of an official nature, she considered it important “for the public service system to have background discussions”. background talks? At least one of Schlesinger’s guests knew nothing about this: Barbara Slowik, Berlin police chief, had a spokesman for an invitation on February 12, 2022, which she and her husband accepted, now say: “Dr. Slowik has the information that the costs for a dinner with the Schlesinger family and Spörl, for which RBB was billed, was noted with great astonishment and irritation. It was in no way apparent to them that this meeting had a professional background.”
On the contrary, Barbara Slowik and her husband were invited to the “inauguration of the new apartment with friends” by “the Schlesinger and Spörl couple, who have known privately for a long time”. The content of the conversation at the dinner was also of a purely private nature. “If it had even become apparent that it was a business meal at the expense of the RBB, Dr. Slowik would have taken over the costs.”
The guest lists for the dinners, which Schlesinger himself did not want to make public and which the RBB has also kept under wraps so far, also raise further questions. Then picture and daily mirror recently published the names of a number of supposedly invited guests. Including that of André Schmitz, SPD politician and former head of the Berlin Senate Chancellery. Schmitz told the SZ when asked: “I never went to Mrs. Schlesinger for dinner.”
“RBB must regain lost trust, the station’s top management must regain its credibility, it will be a long road,” said Friederike von Kirchbach, Chair of the Broadcasting Council, after a special meeting of the committee on Monday evening in Berlin. Another meeting in the coming week will specifically deal with the termination of Patricia Schlesinger’s contract – and with Wolf-Dieter Wolf, who is currently resting his position as chairman of the board of directors, but has not yet resigned. In the meantime, Verena Formen-Mohr, head of the RBB’s main department, has been released from work, as a broadcaster spokesman confirms.