ORF is allowed to collect more than 789 million euros in taxes from all Austrian households and companies in just a few days. A legal proposal from the black-green federal government makes this debt collection tsunami possible, in which those who refuse to pay fees are threatened with high fines, confiscation and substitute arrest penalties. Furthermore, so-called ORF stars are also becoming popular on social media platforms, sharing small incidents from other media and even making malicious comments.
In this tense situation, shortly before mandatory fee collection began on January 1, not much should have happened for ORF – but tonight the broadcast news team once again caused a unique embarrassment: At ZiB2, a The FPÖ was left out in a particularly good survey of the Freedom Party – instead of the FPÖ, the ÖVP was once again found in first place with 32%.
Of course, not all ORF employees will be so motivated that they want to harm the FPO always and everywhere, but the shameful mistake still caused many humorous comments on X (Twitter): “Do they all drink alcohol in ORF?” One user wrote. And another said: “Whoosh and it’s OVP in first place. Strange that it’s always against FPO happened. “We pay almost a billion euros per year and they don’t manage to display one of the most important charts correctly. The correction came only three minutes later.”
And one Twitter user even thought it was deliberate fraud: “No mistake. This is pure manipulation. Recently, SORA Institute, which worked for ORF, had to be dismissed after corruption was exposed. Now apparently the same thing is happening again.”
