Climate reporting on ARD: When nobody sees the climate mess

Film premiere at the Rosa-Luxemburg-Gymnasium in Berlin-Pankow: “We are looking” is the name of the film in which the actor Matthias Matschke plays the personified climate pig. A bit of flooding here, a bit of fire there - and the bees are no longer there either, because species are now dying out. Maybe 250 students came to the premiere this Thursday morning and they experienced how the climate pig Matschke rages. Because she can, as Matschke says: “In everyday life or in the media, I hardly appear there.”

What's more interesting than the 35-second spot is its story: Since 2020, the “Klima vor Acht” association has been fighting for better reporting on the climate crisis on television. The name came from a broadcast slot: “On a normal day you can see up to seven exchanges on the stock exchange on public television,” says Friederike Mayer, the association’s chairwoman. This ultimately culminates in the program “Börse vor eight”. Meyer: “The slot in front of the ‘Tagesschau’ has a wide reach.” However, very few Germans have a stock portfolio, while the climate crisis affects everyone. That's why the initiative called for an adequate program: "Climate before eight" and collected 30,000 signatures for it.

The ARD rejected this at the time on the grounds that it did not want to serve activists. Instead, ARD introduced “Sayings before Eight”, obviously a provocation. In fact, the activists are right: reporting on global warming and species extinction is significantly underrepresented on television. “Climate issues play a role in 1.8 percent of the broadcast time of the four major broadcasters, and when it comes to biodiversity it is only 0.2 percent,” says actress Maria Furtwängler – seen for example as “Tatort” commissioner Charlotte Lindholm on ARD. With her MaLisa Foundation she examined ARD, ZDF, RTL and ProSiebenSat1 in 2023. Furtwängler is strongly committed to species protection.

The numbers correspond to those that the “Klima vor Acht” association collects for public broadcasters: Since 2021, it has been accounting for every minute of broadcasting in which the word “climate” appears, but deducts irrelevant terms such as “investment climate” or “air conditioning”. “Our data shows that reporting has decreased,” explains Mayer. In fact, the evaluation of the first half of 2026 showed that the proportion of reporting on the climate problem on ARD and ZDF was less than 1 percent.

In order to change that, the association itself began producing suitable films for a “Climate before Eight” broadcast slot. The three to five minute episodes of the pilot season dealt, for example, with the role of moors, with the Renewable Energy Act, the Greenland ice cream and attribution research - the science that looks at how climate change is already affecting our weather. In 2021, the association cooperated with the private broadcaster RTL and developed the “Climate Update” format, which was broadcast twice a week after the main news from “RTL aktuell”. In 2022 the show was nominated for the Adolf Grimme Prize 2022.

“I hardly appear in everyday life or in the media,” says climate pig Matthias Matsche in the premiere film. It was actually supposed to run before the “Tagesschau” on ARD – as a paid commercial. The association had been collecting donations for this purpose for a year and a half, and the necessary 135,000 euros were raised this year. However, ARD Media GmbH now refused to broadcast it: Reason: The spot was not permissible advertising. According to the State Media Treaty, advertising must serve the purpose of either promoting the sale of products or improving the image of a company. ARD Media saw both of these as not being fulfilled in the case of the “We’re looking” spot. The ARD also cited the new EmpCo directive as a reason for rejection: The EU Commission wants to use it to prevent false environmental statements in advertising.

Friederike Mayer sees both things differently and refers to an image film from Deutsche Telekom: “The campaign was called ‘Open your eyes against hate’ and ran exactly at the point where we wanted to book the broadcast slot.” When working on the “We're looking” film, the association was based on the Telekom image film. In addition, no product-related environmental statements are made, “so the EmpCo is irrelevant”. The club chairwoman: “We have now commissioned a media lawyer to take legal action against the rejection by ARD Media.”