ARD is the regional network of public service broadcasters in Germany. It was founded in 1950 by the nine regional public broadcasters in the German Länder. They all have their own regional broadcast network with dozens of television and radio stations while also contributing content to Das Erste, the nationwide television channel of the group. The ARD channels remain to this day the most popular broadcasters in Germany. The news program Tagesschau, aired every evening at 8 p.m., is by far the most consumed news product in Germany, with a daily average of nearly 10 million viewers.
ARD also runs thematic programs that are available across Germany such as Phoenix, focused on documentaries, and KIKA, focused on children, as well as the international stations Arte (a Franco-German culture-focused channel) and 3sat (a cultural channel run jointly with Austrian and Swiss public television companies).
The tenth member of ARD is the international news and current affairs broadcaster Deutsche Welle (DW), which is available in 30 languages worldwide. The DW radio channel is based in Bonn while the DW television is located in Berlin.
Media assets
Television and radio: Das Erste and regional channels (Bayerischer Rundfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, Radio Bremen, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, Saarländischer Rundfunk, Südwestrundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk), Deutsche Welle (DW)
State Media Matrix Typology for ARD: Independent Public (IP)
State Media Matrix Typology for Deutsche Welle (DW): Independent State-Funded (ISF)
Ownership and governance
ARD operates as a public media entity. It is an alliance of regional public media organizations, which are part of ARD and organized in line with the laws of the Lander or, if more than one state is involved, with agreements between more Lander.
All PSM corporations in ARD are governed by a Rundfunkrat (Broadcasting Council) whose members are supposed to ensure the independence of the broadcaster as they must be appointed from all the “socially relevant groups” of society, according to a Federal Constitutional Court’s ruling. The Broadcasting Councils elect the director of each ARD member broadcaster.
The council members are appointed from among official representatives, employer and trade associations, employee organizations and unions, churches and educational institutions. These representatives are legally obliged to represent the general public and not the organization that nominated them.
The nine state broadcasting corporations that are members of the ARD send members to the Committee Chairmen’s Conference (GVK),, which tasks one of the broadcasting companies (members) with managing the whole group for one year. The general manager of this managing broadcaster becomes the chairman of the ARD. Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb), for example, has been the managing institution since January 2022. The chairwoman of the Broadcasting Council at rbb, Friederike von Kirchbach, has thus been ARD chairman since then.
DW follows a similar board appointment logic as all other ARD entities.
Source of funding and budget
The public media in Germany (ARD and ZDF, see ZDF below) are almost entirely funded by license fee, a tax that must be legally paid by every citizen who owns a device that offers audiovisual content in Germany. ARD is also allowed to carry advertising (but only between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m., Monday to Saturday). Every household in Germany has to pay a license fee for public media worth €18.36 a month. In 2021, ARD had a total budget of €6.9bn. The license fee revenue accounted for nearly 85% of that, according to data from the broadcaster. In 2022, ARD had a total budget of €6.95bn, 85% of that being contributed by the license fee.
Only DW is funded separately, receiving nearly its entire budget from the federal budget. In 2020, DW was awarded over €410m from the federal budget, which represented almost 90% of its total budget.
Editorial independence
There are no rules imposed by the German Lander governments or by the Federal Government that encroach upon the editorial independence of ARD. The broadcaster has a solid reputation as a journalism powerhouse, financially stable and independent, and fully accountable to the public.
At the same time, the Interstate Broadcasting Agreement requires all broadcasters in Germany to ensure the “free individual shaping of public opinion and the plurality of opinion.”
In Germany, the freedom of the press is guaranteed in the country’s Basic Law. However, there is no domestic statute that specifically guarantees the editorial independence of ARD. Yet, as editorial independence is of major importance for the station, Germans thought that the best guarantees for editorial freedom can be offered through funding and governance (a financial model based on fees paid by the public and a governing body as diverse as possible to prevent government’s interference).
The work of DW is regulated by the Deutsche Welle Act, which ensures the broadcaster’s editorial independence.
ARD broadcasting organizations have their own programming committees whose mission is to give advice on and supervise the programming of their broadcasters as well as to agree on broadcast production contracts with a value over a certain amount.
September 2023