The woman who is supposed to clean up the RBB as interim director is Katrin Vernau, is 49 years old. The RBB Broadcasting Council elected her on Wednesday, but only in the second ballot, with the required two-thirds majority of those present. According to RBB, she received 16 out of 20 votes. As the previous WDR administrative director, Vernau is familiar with finances and for the past few days perhaps a little, which can’t hurt, with the sensitivities of the battered broadcaster for Berlin and Brandenburg. There they are fiercely in favor of a new start in the RBB, but also severely divided. And so the selection committee unanimously decided on Vernau as the only candidate on Sunday; This immediately led to public criticism from the freelance RBB employees and the editorial committee, although the spokeswoman for the freelancers is a member of the selection committee. Measured against the catastrophes of recent times, the excitement about the “self-chosen alternatives” (statement of free representation) was apparently only moderately shocking, in any case, the search committee pulled the thing through, time was pressing.
Speaking of time: Because there are strange coincidences, ex-director Patricia Schlesinger reported a few hours before the election in the Hamburg weekly newspaper The time and repeated confidently and lithely what she had already said to the broadcasting council before they fired her on August 15: that she had underestimated the anger of the employees about her modernization plans, but had done nothing wrong – not at dinner in her apartment, which was paid for by the broadcaster, not in dealing with the resigned chairman of the board of directors, Wolf-Dieter Wolf, who was also chairman of the supervisory board at Messe Berlin and brought up Schlesinger’s husband there as a consultant. Women are now encouraging her on the street: “Please hold on.” But she’s now thinking about privileges that she didn’t think about before, says Schlesinger. Are they still up to date?
Vernau’s first task could be to prove that she is not coming as Buhrow’s envoy
In any case, at RBB, the epicenter of an ARD-wide crisis, Vernau will be interim director in the station for a maximum of one year. since the Schlesinger affair is looking for himself. The RBB works more or less in self-administration – meanwhile the deputy of the deputy director had the say. On Tuesday, Vernau had already introduced himself to the members of the Broadcasting Council in a switching conference. After consultation with the legal supervisory authority, the state of Brandenburg, an invitation to tender was waived for the exceptional choice.
The personality is doubly interesting. On the one hand, the doctorate in economics, who ran in 2011 as a non-party member in the team of the Baden-Württemberg SPD top candidate Nils Schmid, has qualifications for broadcasting renovation: As a former Chancellor of the Universities of Ulm and Hamburg, she has experience with self-governing organizations; As a former partner of the management consultancy Roland Berger, people apparently trust her to take a cool look at the many questionable issues in the RBB from the outside. On the other hand, it is precisely not that: from the outside. Rather, she comes from the WDR and has been the right hand of the director Tom Buhrow there since 2015, who triggers certain feelings in the RBB. As ARD chairman, Buhrow had withdrawn his confidence from the RBB management under Schlesinger’s deputy, Hagen Brandstätter. In the end, this accelerated the realignment, but it was still received as an affront by the station. In the meantime, the RBB research team reported on Tuesday that Buhrow, contrary to what he had claimed, had been talking about the controversial and now abolished bonus system in the RBB have known he denies that.
So Vernau’s first task could be to prove that she is not coming to RBB as Buhrow’s envoy. In the ARD she is described as someone who likes conflict but approaches things with an open mind. Sometimes the attributions are surprisingly reminiscent of what was praised about Patricia Schlesinger when she ran for the first time as RBB boss. As a lateral entrant, Vernau quickly became a skilled fighter for an effective public broadcaster, they say. With the job at the RBB, she naturally brings herself into the conversation for future directorships. She is expected to quickly take control of the numbers at the home, which is on hold on a construction project that has seen costs soar from £60million to an estimated £188million now; the employment contracts of senior employees are now a case for the Berlin Court of Auditors. An external law firm is examining the processes under Schlesinger on behalf of Sender Compliance.
Under these circumstances, for some the choice of Vernaus is a stroke of luck, for others their expectations have been disappointed. That’s how the broadcaster is right now: divided into people who want to see a tidy up and others who have learned from the crisis at the top that it has to be grassroots-democratic if something is to change at the top. The assessment that Vernau comes into a very emotional environment is a very reserved description of the circumstances. Vernau can now not only make economic plans, but also has to listen to people, some say, and the question also arises as to whether the assertive doer can play this register. Unlike Schlesinger, Vernau doesn’t have the ability to underestimate people’s anger.