Böhmermann bites the hand that signs his checks

The German public broadcasting fee—the Rundfunkbeitrag—costs every household a flat monthly rate regardless of whether they own a television, use the services, or can stand the programming. The money funds ARD, ZDF, and a sprawling constellation of regional and radio broadcasters. In exchange, Germans get crime procedurals, regional news, the occasional documentary, and a lot of sport nobody asked for. The fee generates billions annually, and every few years a political argument breaks out about whether this is a reasonable arrangement or an extortion scheme dressed in cultural clothing.

Jan Böhmermann hosts Neo Magazin Royale on ZDF Neo, which puts him in the peculiar position of being both a beneficiary of the system and one of its more credible critics. He’s smart enough to know this is funny. When he addressed the fee on his own show—asking what public broadcasting is actually for in an age when Facebook and Google have colonized the attention economy—he wasn’t pretending to be neutral. He was an employee doing a performance review of his employer, live on his employer’s channel. That tension is, in a way, the most interesting thing about him.

His actual position, as far as I could read it, is something like cautious hopefulness: that public broadcasting could justify itself if it were willing to be genuinely weird, risky, and resistant to the same commercial logic it was supposedly built as an alternative to. Whether ARD and ZDF are capable of that is a different question. The infrastructure exists. The appetite, inside those institutions, is harder to locate. Böhmermann keeps poking at it anyway. The fact that they keep airing him is either encouraging or proof that they still don’t quite understand what he’s doing.