A year ago, the then ARD chairman Tom Buhrow gave his famous keynote speech in the Hamburg Übersee Club, with a lot of flair of new beginnings and the world’s oceans, but so to speak off duty – expressly not as ARD chairman. At that time, Buhrow had been WDR director for nine years The highest-paid station manager has an annual salary of 413,400 euros, and he had already been ARD chairman in 2020 and 2021. Now he demanded fundamental reforms, questioned, among other things, whether the two national television programs from ARD and ZDF were needed, and suggested a round table that should put public broadcasting on a new social basis. Everyone who was intensively dealing with this topic under the devastating impact of the RBB scandal and who had not yet heard such tones from Buhrow in the negotiations fell out of the clouds – the directors and the broadcasting commission of the states briefly found out about the speech before or not at all. A year later, a future council is working on reforms, but ARD and ZDF are facing a blockage in contributions.
Tom Buhrow in an interview: “I reject overprivileged and ailing people” – media
