this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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And how would being nominated by Merkel make them in any way tend to be fair and honest when it comes to reporting about the Die Linke?
I've seen this kind of "independent" board of State-funded broadcasters with political appointments in a couple of countries and they just tend to have a pro-Establishment slant: For example, the much vaunted "2 sides" take on everything by the BBC is almost always just the reducing of social and political subjects to the views of the two main political parties - the Tories and New Labour - to quite an extreme level excluding non-mainstream voices unless they're pro-Capital (so, the Greenparty is barelly visible even though they represent millions of voters but UKIP and UK Reform were a lot more visible even before getting a parliamentary presence).
I'm not saying they're not independent (I am not German, only live in Germany for a few months, barelly speak the language and don't follow German news in German media), just pointing out that plenty of places have such mechanisms to provide the appearence of independence whilst constraining their "independence" to just balancing reporting between the viewpoints of the two main parties whilst under-reporting the rest and using the same kind of slant in reporting as we see in the reporting of the Israeli-Genocide when it comes to sources other than the two main parties (i.e. when sources on one side say "something happenned" it's reported as "something happenned", when the source is the other side it's reported as "side says something happenned").
There is a difference between pro establishment and pro government though. In this case Die Linke would probably get away better, if DW would have been pro government, as the only way the current government can remain in power is realisticly to gain more votes and add Die Linke to the governing coalition. Otherwise one of the two governing parties SPD or Greens is likely to be kicked out, as they would govern with the Union.
German public broadcasting is modelled mostly after the BBC, but has quite a lot of impact from the state level, rather then just the federal level.
Also Linke has been in state level government before and have achieved very little. They are not as much out of the establishment as the UK Greens are, despite being of a similar party size.