A reporter team from WDR interviewed politicians in the Bundestag last week. However, the reporters turned away from numerous CDU MPs after hearing which party the respondents belonged to. The WDR has a simple explanation for this.
Jürgen Hardt, member of the Bundestag and foreign policy spokesman for the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, was quite irritated last week when a reporter team from WDR was on site in the Bundestag. These included an editor and a child reporter.
Hardt shared his thoughts in two tweets, writing in one post: “In the Bundestag, WDR is interviewing politicians through a nice little boy. I sat right between the boy and an editor who whispered the questions into the boy’s ear over the radio.” Apparently Hardt found this approach incomprehensible. The post polarized the Twitter community. Steffen Bilger, like Hardt a member of the Bundestag, agreed with his colleague and commented: “It’s disturbing anyway that he was given the questions. I’m sure he could have done that on his own.”
In addition, some readers made fun of his post: “Jürgen, you old detective” wrote one. Other users didn’t see anything bad about it: “Ok, and where exactly is the problem? Either you make statements or you don’t, no matter who asks.”
In his next post, however, Hardt’s problem became clearer. He wrote: “Always the same process: “Which party are you from?” If the answer was “CDU”, the interview was over. Not so with Green politicians, e.g. Ricarda Lang. Very balanced… What’s that supposed to mean?”
FOCUS online asked WDR and confronted the broadcaster with Hardt’s allegations. The child reporter was therefore active for the program “The Carolin Kebekus Show in the Bundestag”. When asked whether CDU politicians were waived for this, the broadcaster wrote: “Politicians from all parties were satirically interviewed in a balanced way for a single player on the show. If it became apparent that the talks had little substance, some of the interviews were broken off, but regardless of the party concerned. Attempts were also made to speak to politicians who could be expected to be as well known to the public as possible.”
Accordingly, the reporter team had already interviewed other CDU politicians, since the interview was canceled directly after the party question.
