Gerhart Baum, ex-FDP interior minister, is an outspoken and combative fighter for democracy. For him, this also includes the fight for public broadcasting that really fulfills its constitutional mandate. Baum has been a member of the WDR Broadcasting Council since 2016 – delegated by the North Rhine-Westphalia Cultural Council. And while the bosses of the nine ARD stations are currently centralizing and planning “competence centers” while they have joint programs produced for radio information waves and third-party programmes, an informal cross-station alliance has also come together in the station supervision: A group of culture -Broadcasting councils, among them Gerhart Baum, who spoke for the first time last week with a policy paper. The members belong to the supervision of ARD broadcasters, Deutschlandfunk and Deutsche Welle and are delegated by cultural institutions, the partner is the German Cultural Council. Your policy paper is critical – it is “required resistance” to the centralization plans of the directors. However, it is important to Baum that this is not about a special status for the culture. He is basically concerned with the state of public broadcasting.
“This is a loss of competence”: Gerhart Baum on ARD plans – culture
