Chats from the media environment, which appear in a recent report by the Office of the Public Prosecutor for Economic Affairs and Corruption (WKStA), caused rumblings at Austria Press Agency (APA) and ORF. The APA editorial board was “outraged” by “threats against independence” from the news agency. In the chats it was read, for example, that an investor and “major donor to a governing party” declared in 2019 that the APA should be “tidy”.
The APA editorial team “strongly rejects this request, which was directed at the then Vice-Chancellor, ex-FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache. The APA is independent of the state, and that’s a good thing,” the agency pointed out Sunday on its statute, according to which it “has to fulfill its tasks independently of the influence of political and economic institutions and groups (…) and avoiding any one-sidedness and partisanship”. Since the company was founded in 1946, it has been fulfilling this task “in an exemplary manner”.
- ZIB 1: Chats burden editors-in-chief
The ORF editorial board, on the other hand, calls for a “proper processing” of the chats, which brought criticism to the then ORF-2 editor-in-chief and current TV News editor-in-chief Matthias Schrom. A dialogue from spring 2019 dealt with the content of ORF reporting and the FPÖ’s personnel requests. The stumbling block in the chat was a “ZiB 24” report that Strache disliked. Schrom agreed with “that is of course impossible”. Regarding the content of ORF 1 and ORF 2, he wrote: “We already have enough to do and it’s tedious every day, but it’s getting slow and there are fewer people who think they have to save the SPÖ.” ORF 1 is “much more left” than ORF 2. As a result, there were two personnel requests from the FPÖ.
In a circular email to TV editors and ORF executives, Schrom now admitted that the chat history “admittedly did not have a happy external effect”. This conversation took place “against the background of massive attacks by the FPÖ on the ORF.” Personnel requests were “never taken into account,” explained Schrom, who announced a meeting for today.
Source: Nachrichten
