Kohl, Helmut (1930—)

Helmut Kohl, born in 1930, was German chancellor from 1982 to 1998. In the course of his political career, he has also held the post of prime minister of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate from 1969 to 1976 and was chairman of the Christian Democratic Party from 1973 to 1998. Kohl is especially known as the chancellor of German reunification.

At the beginning of his career at the Federal State level, Kohl had positive media responses most of the time, especially in the regional media, and he was regarded as the upcoming man of the Christian Democratic Union. His relationship to the media changed for the worse, however, when he became a chairman of his party's program commission in 1970; it deteriorated even further when he took over the role of opposition leader in the national parliament in 1976. Since these days, Kohl has often been the subject of satire and caricature. Journalists named him “The Pear” because they found his figure was somewhat pear shaped. Moreover, the media took to calling his wife “The Barbie of Palatinate,” thereby alluding to her blond hair and immaculate outward appearance. Furthermore, content analyses of his TV appearances during national election campaigns showed that he was frequently filmed from unfavorable camera angles, and TV stations presented negative crowd reactions in combination with his person more often than was the case with his competitors. These are only a few examples to illustrate that Kohl had to counter his negative media image much more than any other chancellor. This might be a reason why only a handful of journalists belonged to his inner circle, not a few of them foreign journalists. Kohl systematically ignored some parts of the German media for years, especially the weekly magazine Spiegel.

Considering that his relationship to the media had already been difficult for years, it became even worse when Kohl was suspected of having received donations for his party without identifying them in the party's statement of accounts in 1999. Although he admitted to having received money in a TV interview, he was not willing to give away the names of he donators. Some facts gave rise to the suspicion that the donations had been bribe money. Kohl reacted to these reproaches by accusing the media of having started a campaign against him that was meant to destroy his reputation and lifetime achievements. He even went so far as to call the reporting on his case a violation against the national broadcasting treaty that regulates public service broadcasting in Germany. In addition, he publicly speculated about secret connections between the office of the district attorney on one side and the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the news magazine Spiegel on the other side.