Germans Heatedly Debate Public TV : Media: Kohl’s party leads charge to reform biggest network, cut its budget. Satirical program draws ire.

Barney and Big Bird have stayed out of the fray--and Newt Gingrich is nowhere to be seen--but debate over the future of German public television is no less emotional without them.

Echoing conservatives in the United States, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s Christian Democratic Union is leading the charge to reform Germany’s biggest and most costly public television network, ARD, and to reduce its funding.

During an unusually raucous, 2 1/2-hour parliamentary debate Wednesday, Kohl and opposition Social Democrats hurled invective at each other over the shouting of fellow legislators. Each side vehemently accused the other of trying to control television for its own political gain.

ARD, or Channel 1, links 11 regional television and radio broadcasters in a loose-knit nationwide network. Kohl’s CDU has proposed slashing that number to six or seven and reducing the influence of the biggest affiliate, the Cologne-based Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) network, which is sympathetic to the Social Democratic Party.

The issue came to a head last week after an ARD political program, “Monitor,” broadcast a brief satire in which Kohl purportedly telephoned his old sauna partner, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, to suggest that the killing in Chechnya was bad public relations.

Kohl lambasted the program--not particularly biting by “Saturday Night Live” standards--calling it “a low point in tastelessness” and “lacking in any sense of decency.” He issued an open letter asking “how far the continued existence of ARD can be justified” and signed on to his party’s slash-and-merge proposal.

“This is nothing more than a transparent attempt to prevent disliked programs and limit the constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of expression and of the press,” Hesse state Prime Minister Hans Eichel, a Social Democrat, said in the opening volley of the debate.

He accused Kohl of supporting private television at the expense of public television.

Social Democratic leader Rudolf Scharping added that Kohl gave interviews to politically friendly private stations with the approach “Ask me the appropriate questions to the following answer.”

Kohl, who had not been scheduled to speak but couldn’t resist a good fight, came back at Scharping with the charge of “cheap hypocrisy and opportunism.” He said that even Social Democratic media specialists had warned that ARD could go broke if it does not tighten its belt.

“We don’t want ARD to go broke,” Kohl insisted.

Unlike in the United States, where Congress allocates funds to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Germany’s public system is financed through monthly viewer fees of about $16 collected by the government and some advertising. But public networks have lost much commercial advertising to private stations and also have a limit on how many ads they can run.

Like supporters of public television in the ongoing U.S. debate, Social Democrats argue that Germany’s public networks guarantee quality information programs and entertainment that are not subject to the pressures of advertisers.

Last week, the Social Democrats threatened to halt the expansion of private television--only 10 years old in Germany--if Kohl tampered with either ARD or ZDF, the smaller and more conservative public television network on Channel 2.

Commercial television cannot expand until the state regulators that issue broadcasting licenses agree on a new media law. Current law limits ownership by a single private company to 49.9% of a station.

Germany’s decentralized public television structure was set up by Allied forces after World War II to reflect the country’s loose federal system and prevent any single political party from gaining control over the nation’s airwaves.

ARD’s content is overseen by a broadcasting council made up of the main political parties and social groups, but its programming often reflects the views of the state governments that fund it.

WDR, in the Social Democrat-governed state of North Rhine-Westphalia, is the largest member of ARD. It has about 4,500 of the network’s 24,000 employees, provides a quarter of the network’s programs and a third of its political documentaries, many of which are critical of Kohl’s domestic and foreign policies.

“The restructuring . . . must end the dominating power position that WDR has developed over the past few decades within ARD,” Kohl said in a statement issued last week.