Germany

Development

Germany has a long history of journalism. After a phase of sporadic nonprofessional dissemination of news until the middle of the 1600s, a sort of correspondence journalism developed until the middle of the 1700s, while a mixture of writers and opinion-arguing journalists was predominant until the mid-1800s. Since then, the modern appearance of journalists as part of a newsroom developed, followed, since the middle of the 1970s, by a sort of newsroom-technical journalism in which present forms of online journalism can be included. Attitudes to and standards of journalism have changed dramatically during these phases.

German journalism in the twenty-first century is strongly affected by conditions of the postwar era after 1945: by the efforts of the Allies to create a new media elite, which was to be democratic and free of contamination by the old Nazi ideology; by the emergence of a democratic press, which endorsed critical reporting as a part of developing a better future; and by the early commercialization of the press, which began with the reappointment by the Allied military administration of the former (antiNazi) editors to leading positions.

A sensationalistic journalism developed in the 1950s and 1960s (in the tabloid newspapers operated by Axel Springer of a Hamburg-based editor family, among others), while in the newly built system of public service broadcasting the ideal of a journalism oriented towards a democratic mission was promoted.

With the inception of commercial broadcasting in 1984 in West Germany (in East Germany the media were state owned and nearly completely under the control of the ruling communist party) and the competition that resulted from this so-called dual system, another important sphere of public communication yielded to commercialization. This commercialization has its effects on journalism as a whole. Deregulation and competition give the advertising industry more weight, so that journalism is increasingly orientated to advertiser interests and becomes more market driven.

The end of Soviet-controlled East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR) and the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 brought about a new situation: the two different models of journalism had to merge. The media system of the former GDR was highly centralized under the control of the Communist Party. In consequence of the merging, the attitudes and self-perception of journalists became an important research topic for media and communication scholars, which also provided answers to earlier criticism that German journalism in West Germany before unification had been too removed from the political opinions of the majority of the population and too left wing.

...