Political party wins court battle, right to air commercial

In a clear victory for free speech and democracy, a German high court has ruled that a legal political party cannot be denied its right to air an election advertisement on the public broadcasting circuit.

Prior to the decision, the Hessischer Rundfunk television network (HR) had refused to air a certain political party's commercial. In the words of Helmut Reitze, the Director General of HR:
"The cause of freedom of expression and the parties' freedom to campaign cannot lead to public broadcasters being forced to spread campaign messages that contain racist or inhuman ideology."

Whether or not the party's amateur commercial contained "racist" and "inhuman" material is for the viewer to decide but, in terms of policy, the spot proposes the following major items: cutting funds spent on foreign integration, mosques and synagogues and deporting foreigners who are hostile to the majority culture. I am not sure cutting funds on integration and places of worship is "racist", nor is deporting those who are hostile to the native culture. "Inhuman" also seems to be beyond what the party proposes, here. Therefore, this seems to be a case where the highly-emotive buzzwords applied to silence the content stick louder than the content, where a lib-lefty tried to push a view she did not like into the gutter of extremity.

It is always interesting to see what happens when lib-left opinions come into conflict with free speech and opinion, two freedoms that liberals have traditionally fought for - at least, when their own views were not challenged in the process. This is the first thing to consider.

The second thing to consider is that, like most television stations throughout Germany, HR is part a media group called the ARD. The ARD controls the following networks, as well as a number of joint projects and subsidiaries:






The ARD's influence is different from that of the privately-owned web of media and communications control in the United States; it is funded through an agency called the GEZ, which gets its money through a tax on television-owning households. Still, the German system yields the same result as the American one: the select few have the opportunity to project their world view and opinions which fail to deviate from the status quo.

Incidentally, the status quo, reflected in the ARD's programming, is that it is "racist" and "inhumane" for the German nation to retain its ethnic German character. To propose a break from social policies encouraging more non-Germans to flock to Germany - that too, is seen as "racist" and "inhumane." Basically, the state's considerations regarding the retention of an ethnic German nation go only as far as a devotion to multiculturalism and tolerance will allow.

As for alternative programming, what is available in Germany is nearly identical to what is available in the US: the same handful of stations, controlled by the same basic media conglomerates. When the eyes and ears of the public are controlled by the same source with the same opinions, the people are incredibly vulnerable, for they are only seeing and hearing what the ruling regime or its ideological allies want to (or can afford to) show. For that reason, the court decision against the HR was a clear victory for freedom - the freedom of discourse and the freedom to use one's own eyes and ears to construct an opinion.