The Ibiza scandal claims another prominent victim: the TV editor-in-chief of the ORF loses his post. He chatted very intimately with the then FPÖ boss Strache about the left-wing attitude of his station and the orientation of the reporting.
As a result of the corruption investigations in Austria following the Ibiza affair, the TV news editor-in-chief of the public broadcaster ORF, Mathias Schrom, has resigned with immediate effect. The broadcaster accepted Schrom's offer of resignation, as reported by the Austrian news agency APA. The background is chats in which Schrom talked in 2019 with the then Austrian Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache from the right-wing populist FPÖ about the content of ORF reporting and personnel requests from the FPÖ.
The Ibiza scandal led to the fall of the Austrian government in 2019. The background was an unveiling video secretly shot in Ibiza, which shows how the then FPÖ leader and later Vice Chancellor Strache promised a supposed Russian oligarch niece before the 2017 parliamentary elections in return for campaign help.
About a year ago, the then Chancellor Sebastian Kurz resigned as head of government and later also as ÖVP party leader after allegations of infidelity, bribery and corruption. The allegations against him are related to the Austrian media. At the beginning of November, renewed revelations from the resulting investigations then brought TV editor-in-chief Schrom into distress.
According to the chat histories, the journalist was in regular contact with the FPÖ and exchanged views with Strache about the content of the ORF reporting and the FPÖ’s personnel requests. Among other things, he wrote: "We already have enough to do and it's difficult every day, but it's getting slower and there are fewer people who think they have to save the SPÖ." He assumed that the ORF 1 editorial team had a left-wing attitude.
Schrom himself had previously admitted that the leaked messages "admittedly did not have a happy external effect". He indicated that it was important to maintain a "talking ground" with a governing party that had been hostile to the ORF.
