Fall Julia Ruhs: If you want freedom of expression, you have to endure it

Many years ago I worked with a colleague at an earlier professional ward who probably chooses the AfD today. We fought over almost everything, partly bitterly: about dealing with refugees, security in Germany, gender issues.

Nevertheless, I always found it important that this colleague was in the team. Not only because I knew that with his comments he hit a nerve with some of our readers. But also because he, a really smart person and good journalist, repeatedly challenged me in my own positions and forced me to check them.

You don’t have to share the positions of journalist Julia Ruhs to consider her dismissal as a moderator of the program “Klar” by the NDR to be wrong. You don’t have to find it good that Ruhs has built up a large part of her career, especially with provocative positions. The sociologist Steffen Mau once described this with the term “polarization entrepreneur”.

Of course, it is not the only one, not even on public service broadcasting. Also a colleague like Georg Restle, Moderator of the ARD polite magazine Monitor, plays with the fact that he permanently worsens his theses in a political direction.

It is also a fact that the public service broadcasting has the order to reflect the diversity of opinion in society. It is therefore correct if the “Deutschlandfunk” also regularly interviews AfD politicians. And the variety of opinion also includes letting a moderator have a say that represents a different position than the majority of the editorial team, which, however, corresponds to the opinion of many people in the country.

The boundaries are easy to define: fake news and obviously substance-free defamation have no place in public service broadcasting. Others should be given space, especially since the radio contributions of people with very different views are paid.

In addition, with its droughts reason for this step, the NDR exacerbates the impression of some that there is an uncomfortable voice – and thus gives those food that propagate “left -green woker” views. So well if the Bavarian Rundfunk Ruhs continues as a moderator of the program in the episodes produced by it. After the controversy, a high ratio of the NDR should be certain after the controversy.

It is a coincidence that a different message arrived shortly after the Causa Ruhs became known from the United States: the broadcast of the extremely popular moderator Jimmy Kimmel is discontinued until further notice. He had dared to criticize in his show that the Trump environment exploited the terrible attack on the activist Charlie Kirk for political purposes.

It is unlikely that those who are now calling for Cancel Culture at Julia Ruhs would say something similar in Kimmel. But this also applies the other way round: if you echoed yourself at Kimmel, you will hardly work with the same verve for Julia Ruhs.

But that’s exactly what it is about: If you really want freedom of expression and with all my heart, you have to endure other opinions. “It is clear that everyone who persecutes a person, his brother, because of his deviating opinion, is a miserable creature, “said the French philosopher Voltaire. That was a apt sentence. He still applies today.