The ARD is keeping a low profile, the Lobos are calling for a culture of mistakes

The ARD is still in the process of “journalistically” dealing with the debate surrounding Thilo Mischke and his unsuccessful appointment as “ttt” presenter, as program director Christine Strobl put it in her rejection announcement last weekend; Thilo Mischke has not yet spoken up either.

However, some things are now becoming known about the decision-making process, which did not go as smoothly and in unison for Mischke as the broadcaster had initially claimed. It was said that Mischke was one of two winners of a casting and emerged as the winner in a “user testing with over 100 participants”.

Did Mischke only have two out of six votes on ARD?

The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” now reports that there was a casting with five candidates in June, which someone other than Mischke won with a clear majority. Mischke, on the other hand, could only have received two votes from the six program managers responsible for culture from hr, BR, WDR, MDR, NDR, RBB. Nevertheless, those responsible for the program decided on Thilo Mischke “without further consultation”. Possibly, as the “FAZ” speculates, in order to help Mischke’s podcast with Jule Lobo entitled “ttt for the ears”, which was agreed upon before the moderation election, to attract more attention.

When asked about the “FAZ” information, the ARD, in turn, explained that seven people had been suggested from the editorial teams responsible for “ttt” and that there had been a casting from this group in June 2024. Two candidates emerged from this, including Mischke, and a “target group test” and “user testing” were carried out. Both favorites were close together: “Mischke was particularly convincing in the area of ​​’authenticity’, which, among other things, was the deciding factor for the cast. The evaluation was presented to the broadcasters involved in September 2024. At the beginning of October, all cultural heads involved voted for Thilo Mischke as the new moderator

And anyway, as it says in a statement from ARD: “We had many intensive and sometimes controversial discussions within the editorial teams involved about the appointment of Thilo Mischke. An open culture of discussion is part of our editorial culture and diversity of opinions is part of our journalistic self-image.” This, one suspects, serves as an incentive for accusations that in the Mischke case, program managers who were not particularly informed simply ignored their skeptical editorial teams.

Meanwhile, Jule Lobo has now commented on the matter for a longer period of time after she had only made a short statement on Instagram in which she said that “it shouldn’t just be about the problematic statements”, but that “ “we also have to talk about error culture and dealing with previous mistakes”.

In the podcast “Feel the News”, which she does together with her husband Sascha Lobo, she mainly talks about this: about the “error culture” and how best to deal with the potentially compromising past of individual people. Jule Lobo admits that she knew nothing about Mischke’s book “Around the World in 80 Women”. But would she have agreed to a joint podcast knowing this? “If I had known, I would have had a deeper conversation with him and asked him: How are you dealing with this now?”

Balancing act by Jule and Sascha Lobo

It’s a balancing act, with lots of subjunctive moods and a few pinches of media criticism, that the Lobos demonstrate in their podcast. Namely, on the one hand, to distance oneself from Mischke’s former or continued misogynistic traits. On the other hand, to stand by him. Both agree that the title of the book is sexist and that it makes “super difficult statements”. They also agree on what great work the colleagues from “Feminist Shelf Control” have done “in large parts”. “I would like to expressly recommend the podcast” (Jule Lobo), it is “surprisingly differentiated” (Sascha Lobo). And: Mischke said misogynistic, ableist, racist things, which are highlighted well in the podcast.

But do we have to “judge” a book like this right now in “our sex-positive present,” asks Jule Lobo? Mischke is absolutely not a rapist. And what is the reference to the Pelicot case in the “Feminist Shelf Control” podcast? At some point, Sascha Lobo also objects that too little consideration has been given to the fact that the incriminated book is a novel and that it was always referred to as a “book” in articles about the case (small insert: which is not true in that the publishers Riva and Goldmann have dispensed with the generic term novel on the cover and preferred to emphasize the absolute truth of the whole thing: “An extraordinary travel report, unbelievable, but true”. misogynistic novel raises its problems.)

The Lobo podcast leads to a reckoning with a certain Friederike Häuser and her Instragam “hate” account “Iketype”, which Lobo has been hostile to for ages, and also with the “Spiegel” author and “Feminist Shelf Control” employee Anja Rützel, in order to finally end up with the “tolerance of ambiguity” that society must practice, i.e. the ability to tolerate ambiguity and contradictions. “The question remains how we all deal with it, how we forgive it, how we deal with mistakes,” concludes Jule Lobo.