BSW on culture and media

The BSW wants to keep public broadcasting but restructure it and renegotiate the Medienstaatsvertrag (interstate media treaty). The license fee should not rise, top salaries should fall, and oversight should be kept at a distance from political parties. According to the platform, the aim is to win back lost trust.

The public broadcasters ARD and ZDF should stay. But the BSW wants to change them a lot. The broadcasting fee should not go up. The heads of the broadcasters should earn less. Political parties should have less influence on them.

Pay for directors-general and senior executives would be tied to public-sector salary scales; fees for commentators, experts and celebrities would be capped and made public. Fee payers would get more weight on the supervisory boards. A parliamentary study commission would examine whether the broadcasters report objectively and independently of the government. In-house productions would stay available online without a time limit instead of disappearing after 14 days. The platform complains that only 44 cents of every euro in fees goes into programming.

The BSW wants to declare art, culture and cultural education mandatory tasks of the state and to anchor the protection of culture in the Basic Law. Freelance artists should get better social protection, and the Künstlersozialkasse (artists' social insurance fund) should be kept and reformed.

The BSW wants the state to be required to support art and culture. This should also be written into the constitution. Artists without a steady job should be better protected. The artists' social insurance fund should stay and be improved.

The party backs an initiative to write the protection of art and culture into the constitution. People working in culture would get lasting protection against loss of income that is not their fault. The platform argues that switching between short contracts and unemployment often leads to poverty in old age. Cultural education in schools would be strengthened. Funding would be awarded without discrimination and without requiring political declarations.