Of the countries I lived in, the quality of the broadcasting and reporting in Germany has been the better one so far.

And when you see the flow of vomit produced by most of the private television in the countries around, you realise that the compromise is not perfect, but it's nonetheless miles ahead of most other options.

You also quickly realise that most private channels are owned by powerful players pushing their own agenda, which can bring even more bias and one-sidedness.

I've since been encouraging everyone I know to do the same, and I never forget to tell this backstory.

Besides, DWD is hands down the single best weather app in the DACH region anyway.

The downside is that it's a per head (or per household) sum, not coupled to income like taxes would be. This is usually explained away by the fee being separate from the state, but the reality is that Germany actually has it all implemented, in the form of the opt-in "church tax" coupled to taxable income just like regular tax. Handled by the tax office, but not going too government coffers. Would be so easy to extend the implementation to public broadcasting, because you don't pay to consume the media, you pay to live in an environment that is not dominated by profit-driven broadcasting media. There are many negative things to say about our public broadcasting, but when I look at other countries that don't have strong public broadcasting, it's so much the lesser evil, totally worth the fee.

(personally, I'd love to see that "church tax implementation" opened up to all kinds of opt-in membership organisations that would see value in income-coupled membership fees, I believe that a lot of good things could work that way, with people of all income levels enjoying an objectively fair way of contributing)