A rascal who thinks evil or even believes in coincidence. Within weeks, public broadcaster ARD was busted for a second time because an interviewer in a citizens’ survey turned out to be an “ordered” interviewer.
At first it was one of their own moderators, who was given as a random respondent in a survey a report by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), the largest broadcaster on ARD. He commented on the high prices of food items and showed understanding in the spirit of the red-green legislator. When the fraud was revealed, the responsible editor-in-chief of “ARD Actuel”, Markus Bornheim, escaped mainly by making excuses and the criticism of the critics who allegedly tried to commit the scam.
Now the next free-TV scandal, perpetrated by the Mitteldeutsche Rundfunk (MDR) of Leipzig. In a “citizen dialogue” with Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), an alleged citizen was allowed to speak, talking about climate protection and lashing out against the AfD. The woman was identified as a “31-year-old woman from Erfurt”. In fact, she was Lee Wengel, the press spokeswoman for the state parliamentary group of the Bundesnis 90/Die Grünen. Naturally, there was no criticism of government policy, after all, his party is the SPD’s coalition partner in the federal government.
but that’s not all. The five partisans spoke as “ordinary citizens”. All reportedly came from the Left Party and the Greens, as revealed by blogger Bernd Reitschuster (reitsshuster.de). It is said that there were no voices criticizing the government in the 90-minute programme. “The fact that he made the same mistake again so soon after the Tageschau scandal clearly shows that fee-paying journalists are not just uneducated. You lack awareness of the problem. They know that this behavior is a guarantee that their pension supply institutions with affiliated broadcast operations will continue to be fed liberally with mandatory fees,” writes Reitschster.
