I'm having a little trouble figuring out the basis for the Public Broadcasters task. I cleaned up the English language translation so that it makes sense, but for at least American players, I think this task is still confusing:

In Germany is every single TV taxed a public broadcasting fee? I've lived in Germany for a number of years, but I never had to buy a TV so this escaped me. I also had a hard time discerning public from private stations in Germany. What is considered public? Deutsche Welle?

In the US, public broadcasting is limited pretty much to PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) which is actually a private non-profit organization and not governmental. It receives tax money, but conservative presidents like Bush have removed most of it's funding as they claim it has a liberal bias (I disagree). In fact the Bush administration said the government board that sets funding for PBS no longer has to be made up of people with experience in television. Funny in a very sad, sad way. Personally I love PBS and NPR (public radio) as it's the only way to get unfiltered or non-commercialized news and programs in the US.

Anyway, could someone please explain the basis for this task?

Yes, in Germany every adult with a constant income has to pay the so called GEZ if he owns a TV-set.

Public institutes (Landesrundfunkanstalten) in Germany are:
* Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), München
* Hessischer Rundfunk (hr), Frankfurt
* Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR), Leipzig
* Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Hamburg
* Radio Bremen (RB)
* Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB), Berlin und Potsdam
* Saarländischer Rundfunk (SR), Saarbrücken
* Südwestrundfunk (SWR), Stuttgart
* Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Köln

They have each one TV- and several radio-channels.
Together they are organized in the ARD witch has one TV-channel (Das Erste = the first one) too.
Then you have:
- the ZDF - a very creative name meaning second German TV (after the Das Erste)
- Deutschlandradio
- Deutsche Welle (German radio abroad)
- ARTE (a German-French cooperation)
- Phoenix (documentation channel)
- 3sat (German-Austrian-Swiss cooperation)
- KI.KA (Childrens' channel)

All these are not allowed to show advertisements after 20:00h

The whole rest is private.

This post was last modified: 23.07.2008 04:03 by Z. Beeblebrox.

Ahhhh thank you!

How exactly does the government know if you have a TV or not? One of my roommates brought in several increasingly larger TVs into our apartment and I don't recall him saying anything about a tax. Seems like a very hard thing to enforce.

As I recall, all the German public stations have regular programming on them from sit-coms to reality TV and commercials as well. Very strange from my point-of-view as you would think a publically funded station should be educational or government related only.

And ZDF! Now I understand why their symbol is 2DF! I can't believe I never figured that one out. Yes, I'm an idiot.

Still a difficult task considering the very different setup of public stations between the US and Germany. Our debates about it revolve solely around perceived PBS political bias to one side or the other (usually liberal). Yet PBS viewers consistently score far higher on current event knowledge tests than those who watch private stations, in particular Fox News (an extremely right-wing national station).

I know about FOX News from the Simpsons

Well, the German public TV has another strategy than being solely educational, and I think principially it's a smart one. By broadcasting popular contents they make themselves more attractive for a large mass and so they can reach this mass also with more sophisticated issues. But, in reality... they are not critical enough, by far...

The strangest public television channels are ORF 1/2 (Austrian television). It shows you nearly every A-movie (without commercial breaks! ), most current television series, sports, ...

The trick behind the scenes: ORF cooperates with nearly all German broadcasting companies ... - so it features something like a best-of of ARD/ZDF, SAT1, RTL and PRO7!

From what I've heard, in the UK, they have some sort of van that drives around checking the signals of houses, to see whether there are transmissions being received. Somehow that is linked to database of who pays or not? Erm...

Aha! When in doubt, check Wiki It might work similarly in Germany?

This is very true.

I would characterize PBS as "mostly left-leaning" and Fox as "mostly right-leaning"; there's no way to get carried away. The statistic you cite is likely correlation rather than causation, however.

I know about FOX News from the Simpsons

Gotta love the Simpsons! Exporting America to the world! Although, so many of their jokes are hidden that it must be hard to understand at times if you haven't lived in the US for a while.

The Simpsons are actually owned by the Fox network and routinely make fun of it because Simpson's creator Matt Groening is a Democrat and very liberal. Plus, he knows that Fox can't do anything about it due to the show's popularity.

But making fun of Fox is done best by Stephen Colbert (Colbert Report), one of my favorites, and a true master of debate and political satire. His show is basically a direct parody of Fox News. My German friends tell me he is extremely hard to understand as he almost solely speaks in innuendos. But he is so funny that I have actually hurt myself from laughing so hard.

I guess I can imagine