Nfter the verbal abuse of a WDR employee against the CDU, its general secretary Mario Czaja wrote to the director of the public broadcaster in a letter asking him to distance himself and to take personal action. The reason for the letter is a video on the social platform Instagram, in which the broadcaster’s freelancer and satirist Jean-Philippe Kindler declared the CDU “our enemy” at the beginning of January and spoke up for “radicalization against the shitty party”.
The video literally says that anyone who expresses themselves like CDU politicians on New Year’s Eve is “to be fought as an enemy in the most radical way”. The reason for the enemy call were reactions from the Union to the New Year’s Eve attacks against rescue and security forces. Czaja wrote a letter to the director Tom Buhrow at the end of the week, which the FAZ has received.
It says: “For us as the CDU in Germany, it is clear that Mr. Kindler has crossed a line. Democracy thrives on the exchange of opinions and also on diversity of opinion. You know that not least because of the mandate of public broadcasting.”
“No GEZ fees for such agitation”
Freedom of expression is not guaranteed without restrictions. In particular, it ends where it “simply aims to make the other person look disrespectful.” so Czaja.
After the WDR had not particularly reacted to it since the hate call, or had senior employees of the station explain the matter as a “private individual opinion”, the CDU Secretary General now calls on Buhrow “to clearly distance yourself from the statements of your free Distancing yourself from the employee and critically reviewing any current or future collaboration.”
According to Caja, the behavior of the freelancer harms the reputation of the WDR and the trust in its non-partisan journalistic work. According to Caja an Buhrow, you don’t have to “like everything that the parties do or demand. But what unites the democratic parties is that they defend democracy against enemies from within and without.” Anyone who declares a democratic party like the CDU an enemy also “declares democracy an enemy.” Whether this happens with or without the toleration of West German Broadcasting, he decides, the director.
For his part, Czaja had outraged WDR employees by initially writing on Twitter: “If a WDR employee declares us as an enemy as a party and calls for an unbearable fight against us, then a limit has been crossed. No GEZ fees for such agitation!” This in turn prompted the WDR editor-in-chief of the program “Monitor”, Georg Restle, to make the statement: If the CDU general secretary calls for “the public broadcaster to turn off the money tap because the private broadcaster If the individual opinion of a satirist does not fit, then a limit has really been crossed”.
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