German press club

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Reception at the press club for Libyan ministerial officials in 1960
Finnish guests in the press club in 1961

The German Press Club e. V. was founded in Bonn in 1952 . It has been based in Berlin since 2000 .

Goal setting

The declared aim of this club was to create a forum for German journalists based in Bonn in which so-called 'background discussions' with the respective ruling politicians and other representatives of public life are possible without their being cited by name. This practice is called off-the-record ; Anyone who violates this basic rule (expressly stipulated in Article 3 of the statutes) will be immediately excluded - this has only happened once since the club was founded.

When it was founded, 23 journalists, all of them political capital correspondents , elected Robert Strobel ( Die Zeit , later Stuttgarter Nachrichten ) to be its founding chairman, and six other correspondents signed the charter. The board consists of seven members who are elected by the general meeting by secret ballot for one year.

Club structure

Originally limited to 50, a year later to 70 members, membership in this association meant that handpicked journalists were privileged - foreign correspondents were generally not allowed. This practice was abandoned in the late 1950s. At the moment, full-time journalists reporting on federal politics and media correspondents based in the Federal Republic of Germany can become full members in Berlin or Bonn. Other journalists can become guest members. All that is required is an informal application for admission, which an admission committee decides on and informs the members about. In the event of objections to the new admission, the board or the general meeting decides. Another category is "corresponding members"; The latter also include business lobbyists and public service representatives. These "corresponding members" are sustaining members and, in order to avoid conflicts of interest, are not allowed to participate in the journalistic background discussions. Today the association has around 110 full members, 80 guest members and 20 corresponding members.

criticism

From the beginning, the association stood between the free association of capital city correspondents ( federal press conference ) and the official institution of government spokespersons ( federal press office ). He was criticized for the restrictive election of members and suspected of being too close to the government - especially during the Adenauer era . For the former Federal Chancellor, the press club was a welcome means of presenting his political ideas in advance, i.e. to the exclusion of the public - with a time advantage for the club members. This was the main accusation that foreign correspondents in particular made at the time. With the purchase of a joint clubhouse and the accession of the Foreign Press Association to the Presseclub-Wirtschafts-GmbH , this dispute was settled in April 1954: they moved into a house ( Adenauerallee 89b ) in what was then Koblenzer Strasse. In 1977 the press club finally moved into a villa in the center of the government district ( Heinrich-Brüning-Straße 20 ), which had been added by the Federal Building Department ; he resided there for the last twenty years until he finally moved to Berlin. In Berlin, the German Press Club no longer has a clubhouse, the background discussions usually take place in hotel rooms. On November 12, 2012, the German Press Club celebrated its 60th anniversary with a ceremony and a speech by Federal President Joachim Gauck . In this speech, Gauck referred, among other things, to what, in his opinion, "only appears to be a contradiction between confidentiality in the background and the transparency that citizens can expect."

Chairperson

literature

Web links

Commons : German Press Club  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ bundespraesident.de: Ceremonial event "60 Years of the German Press Club" (accessed on May 18, 2015)