Media researcher Dr. Sascha Hölig is an expert advisor to ZDF Television Council and has been supporting the council for two years in implementing the quality goals of ZDF’s voluntary commitment. Within the team, he has been mainly concerned with ZDF Kompass measurement tools, their potentials and limitations. In an interview published in the newsletter of ZDF Television Council, he draws a conclusion.
“I found our work extremely interesting and challenging. With the large number of key figures available from ZDF KOMPASS, it was sometimes not easy to keep track of the informative value associated with the measurement instruments used and how they can be used to accurately classify the achievement of the SVE goals. The diverse composition of our team was very helpful in this regard, and it was a pleasure to work together to address the interplay between legal requirements, their translation into SVE objectives, and a robust empirical review. I hope our work has helped the television council to some extent in assessing whether the objectives have been achieved or not.”
In Sascha Hölig’s view, the five core objectives formulated for 2025/2026 reflect the mandate of public broadcasting as formulated by the legislature. In accordance with the requirements of Section 31, Paragraph 2 of the Interstate Media Treaty and Section 3, Paragraph 4 of the ZDF statutes, ZDF publishes a report every two years on the fulfillment of its mission, the quality and quantity of its offerings, and the planned focus of its programming services (so-called self-commitment declaration).
Sascha Hölig personally finds core objective 1 “ZDF provides information with facts” and core objective 3 “ZDF illuminates backgrounds and helps to understand contexts” the most interesting. In both cases it is a question of whether ZDF succeeds in maintaining or gaining the trust of its users in order to be perceived as the most suitable source when it comes to understanding the world. This is a crucial point where ZDF as a journalistic actor can positively differentiate itself from the multitude of other content providers and generate significant added value for its audience.
Regarding the innovations in the metrics, Hölig said that one of the things he noticed was that in the context of the trust mentioned above, “trust in reporting” and “agreement with credibility” were generally mentioned as metrics. In his view, this is a rather general approach, where a more sensitive consideration might be helpful. The credibility of facts is an important aspect of trust in journalistic performance, but there are other factors involved, such as which facts are chosen in the first place or how they are classified by journalists. Insights into this broader view of trust could certainly be useful both in terms of assessing the achievement of objectives and as strategic knowledge for decision-makers.
Read the full interview in German here.