In November 2009 the administrative board of the public broadcaster ZDF voted on extending the contract of its editor-in-chief, Nikolaus Brender. Roland Koch, the premier of Hesse and deputy chair of the board, opposed the extension and pointed to falling ratings for ZDF’s news programs. Brender received seven of fourteen votes. He needed nine. Journalists, among them the ZDF anchor Claus Kleber, protested against party-political influence. On 25 March 2014 the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that members close to the state may hold no more than one third of the seats on ZDF’s Television Council.
television
The Doctor Women Trust
Dr. Stefan Frank – Der Arzt, dem die Frauen vertrauen. Dr. Stefan Frank, the doctor whom women trust. That was the full title of a medical drama made for RTL from 1995 to 2001. It ran for 104 episodes. It was based on a series of novels of the same name from the publisher Bastei.
The Tone of the Tagesschau
The Tagesschau is credited with keeping a sober, informative format since 1960. As a rule, its newsreaders read the reports from a teleprompter. The journalist Willi Winkler described the news as delivered “im amtsmännischen Ton der reinen Sachlichkeit,” in an official’s tone of pure objectivity. When the program turned 70 in December 2022, its editor-in-chief, Marcus Bornheim, named what it values most. “Der größte Wert, den wir haben, ist unsere Glaubwürdigkeit.” The greatest asset we have is our credibility.
A Poem Called Abusive Criticism
On 31 March 2016, the satirist Jan Böhmermann read a poem about the Turkish president on his ZDFneo show Neo Magazin Royale. He introduced it as an example of what is not allowed in Germany. “Ich habe ein Gedicht, das heißt ‚Schmähkritik’.” I have a poem, and it is called abusive criticism. Prosecutors in Mainz closed the criminal investigation in October 2016. In the civil case, the courts in Hamburg banned the defamatory lines. On appeal, 18 of the 24 lines stayed banned. In January 2022 the Federal Constitutional Court declined to hear Böhmermann’s complaint. Long before that, in June 2017, the Bundestag had voted unanimously to abolish Section 103 of the Criminal Code. It was the offense of insulting the organs and representatives of foreign states.
Satire With Sources
Die Anstalt is a political cabaret show on ZDF. Max Uthoff and Claus von Wagner have presented it since 2014. It is comedy. Even so, ZDF publishes Der Faktencheck zur Sendung, the fact check for the show, with its episodes. The aim is to support every statement in the show with sources that are named openly. The fact check for the episode of 11 November 2025, on the housing market, runs to about 33 pages. Most lines from the show are followed by an extract from a source and a link.
The Professor Who Explains the Universe
Harald Lesch holds a chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is also one of the best-known faces of science on German television. From 1998 to 2007 he presented the series alpha-Centauri on BR-alpha. Since 2009 he has presented Terra X: Faszination Universum on ZDF, and later his own series, Leschs Kosmos. In 2005 the German Research Foundation and the Stifterverband gave him their Communicator Prize.
Checked the Next Morning
On 9 February 2025, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his challenger Friedrich Merz met in a televised debate. The next day, the research newsroom CORRECTIV published its check of their figures under the headline Kandidaten argumentierten teils mit falschen Zahlen, the candidates argued partly with false numbers. Merz’s claim that Germany was in the third year of a recession, which had never happened before, was rated as missing context. A claim by Scholz on irregular migration was rated partly false. The public broadcaster ARD has run its own fact-checking desk, the faktenfinder, since April 2017.
Stories About Things
Die Sendung mit der Maus, the program with the mouse, first ran on ARD on 7 March 1971 and took its present name in January 1972. At its core are the Sachgeschichten, the stories about things. A typical one shows how an everyday object is made or how it works. In the early years, the Sachgeschichten followed the principle of silent film, with music and no commentary.
Always On Time
Since 26 December 1952, Germany’s main evening news, the Tagesschau, has run on ARD. For decades its place has been fixed at exactly 8 p.m., opened by a gong. In 2020 and 2021, more than 11.6 million people watched it on average. At its 60th anniversary in 2012, Georg Mascolo, then editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, described it this way: Immer pünktlich, immer zuverlässig, fast immer fehlerfrei und ein kleines bisschen humorlos. Always on time, always reliable, almost always without errors, and a tiny bit humorless. He called it the Glockenschlag der Republik, the stroke of the bell of the republic.
The Seventh Sense
From 4 February 1966 to November 2005, ARD television showed Der 7. Sinn, The Seventh Sense, a short program on road safety. At first, each episode lasted two to five minutes. It showed drivers making mistakes, and then showed the correct way. The narrator was Egon Hoegen. Its guiding question was this. Wie verhält sich Mann oder Frau richtig – unfallfrei – im Verkehr? How does a man or a woman behave correctly, without accidents, in traffic?