Modern Desires by Detlef Siegfried

Author:Detlef Siegfried [Siegfried, Detlef]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789202885
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Berghahn Books, Incorporated
Published: 2020-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Entertainment or Information?

Even at its founding, the twin goals set for Freies Fernsehen paired better in theory than praxis. Industry, which was in search of an advertising platform, was interested in achieving the greatest possible resonance among viewers, and this meant entertainment. On the other side there were the federal government’s political aims, which could only be accomplished if the share of informative programming were relatively high. Borneman focused chiefly on entertainment, seeking first to lessen the pedantic tone of top-down political messaging that still largely characterized German television, and second to gain the upper hand on the competition within public service broadcasting via entertainment’s draw. In contrast to his later self-depiction as a sort of leftist television guerilla, Borneman was hardly able to achieve anything regarding the content of informational and documentary programming given the set political guidelines, and turned his critique instead to formal aspects, which in his view should at least be more entertaining than the competition’s. This view set him diametrically opposite the chief editor Konrad Kraemer, to whom the responsibility for this aspect of programming fell. After his stint at the FFG, Kraemer, a “highly dutiful Catholic” and CDU man from Münster, went on to be the editor in chief at the Catholic News Agency (Katholische Nachrichten Agentur). Entirely in keeping with the prevailing view among most journalists during the Adenauer era, he professed a faith in balance and monotony, not opinion and commentary. “I am concerned with objectivity and truth, even at the risk of coming across as boring. For me, sensation isn’t something for the screen.”385 It was no surprise that Borneman made little of Kraemer’s ideas for programming, which featured titles like “Roundtable Bonn” (Bonner Stammtisch) and “For Our Guest” (Bei uns zu Gast), but also the somewhat more daring “Crossfire” (Im Kreuzfeuer)—all of which seemed “identical and equally boring” to Borneman. The shows were too uncritical, but most importantly they were unfit for television in their formal conception and took too much of a journalistic tack, making them “translations of newspaper articles into television programs.”386 For political programming he recommended that Kraemer’s department develop “a program like the English Panorama,” which “has three or four camera teams filming and presents the week’s events in real living color, rather than having four or five newscasters sitting still in a room talking themselves to death.” In similar fashion, by the early 1960s Borneman anticipated the trend toward entertainment news that would first break through in West Germany in the 1980s.

As the future program began to take shape in the fall of 1960, a conflict thus arose between Borneman and Kraemer regarding the proper proportions of the two types of programming when a coworker presented a comparison of ARD and Freies Fernsehen. While only 24.3 percent of the ARD’s broadcasts were informational or documentary in nature, Freies Fernsehen had plans for 36 percent. The percentage was much too high for Borneman, who thought Kraemer should reduce it to 20 percent or at maximum 25 percent, as with English stations, although this too was on the rise.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.