Hart aber Fair is a political talk show broadcast by Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), a regional public broadcaster in Germany and a member of the ARD consortium. The program features discussions on current topics with guests from politics, business and society. Following each episode, a dedicated team of journalists conducts a fact-checking segment, scrutinizing statements made by guests and promising to verify data mentioned during the live broadcast. This fact-checking content is published on the show’s official website, and purports to give viewers additional context and corrections where necessary.
WDR’s funding comes primarily from the mandatory broadcasting license fee (Rundfunkbeitrag). This fee is collected by a joint agency of ARD, ZDF, and Deutschlandradio. While WDR does generate limited revenue from on-air advertising, the license fee remains its principal source of income.
Commentary:While Hart aber Fair's fact-checking initiative appears to reflect a commitment to post-broadcast accountability, its execution often falls short of true adversarial scrutiny – particularly when high-profile government figures such as Health Minister Karl Lauterbach appear.
The program’s fact-checking tends to validate ministerial narratives using selective data, such as Germany’s comparatively lower COVID-19 mortality, while omitting Lauterbach’s contradictory public statements, such as his claim that injections were more or less side-effect-free (which he later reversed).
This suggests a deferential posture more consistent with reputational protection than impartial verification. More broadly, as a production of WDR – a public broadcaster funded through compulsory fees and historically aligned with establishment consensus – the program exhibits a bias toward official views. Its choice of guests, framing of debate and subsequent fact-checks often reinforce rather than interrogate government positions. Hart aber Fair is therefore not above purveying falsehoods itself, and its interpretive framing in any case rarely challenges the political assumptions of state actors. As with Covid, its coverage of the Ukraine war indicates that Hart aber Fair is primed to "correct" the mention of UN documentation of war crimes committed by the Kiev side – another position it had to retract.
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