The recent public debate about broadcasting fees and financial transparency of the leading public service media ARD and ZDF has been included in the reform process of these institutions. For a few years now, public service media published comprehensive online data on facts and figures such as the spending of broadcasting fees. The second-biggest nationwide public service television ZDF provides detailed information about corporate social responsibility activities online. An ARD-affiliated research unit edits the open access online professional publication Media Perspektiven,which is a trustworthy and valued source in academic ecologies, with mostly quantitative studies about the latest developments in the media industry. Apart from that, scholars publish information about leading news media according to their specific research focus.
The Landesmedienanstalten is an authority which licenses and supervises commercial broadcasters and promotes and finances research on the media system in each of the Länder. They are also responsible for conducting activities to increase media literacy. In a common annual yearbook, all fourteen Landesmedienanstalten present a complete list of all projects (die medienanstalten – ALM GbR, 2019a), which is also accessible online. As it was a decade ago (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011), market shares of commercial broadcasting providers are legally restricted to 30 per cent.
There are legal provisions to ensure two different forms of plurality in the German media system. Firstly, external plurality of ownership of the press is guaranteed by national law and controlled by the Bundeskartellamt, the German antitrust agency. Additionally, there is a special commission that assesses and reports the degree of concentration within the media market with a special focus on the television market (KEK – Kommission zur Ermittlung der Konzentration im Medienbereich). Concentration in the print market is assessed and evaluated by the commercial research institute FormaTT for free. Both institutions publish their reports, and KEK also provides a free Internet database. Print and online media are legally obliged to publicise an imprint in every edition containing the name and address of the responsible publisher. The clear duty to provide information about the person or company responsible for publishing is formulated in national law (Telemediengesetz [Telemedia Act]) as well as in federal law (Landesmediengesetze [State media laws]). Commercial media companies and press publishers like Axel Springer SE present key business figures and information on ownership and other relevant data online, although publishers are not obliged to the same extent to publish business data as other companies.
Second, internal pluralism is guaranteed by the Federal Constitutional Law and its “broadcasting decisions” and is also laid down in the Federal Broadcasting Act [Rundfunkstaatsvertrag]. As the public service media in Germany are equipped with a serve-all mandate, they are obliged to safeguard the broadest possible programme plurality and the plurality of opinions in their media offer. These programme principles are supervised by two governing bodies in each public service media broadcaster: the broadcasting council and the board. To some extent, they publish information about the composition of the bodies, their mandate, and their activities but not on the “circle of friends”, as it is not obvious which member belongs to which of these political leanings (see Indicator C2 – Independence of the news media from powerholders). Scholars, hence, critically assess that not all council meetings are open to the public and decisions are not made transparent enough. Overall, public service media increasingly publish reports on structural data and background information about the German media system, because the last decade saw a growing pressure on public service media to start reforms and digitisation, forcing them to reinvent themselves in the digital age (Herzog et al., 2018).
