Schulz, Winfried (1938–)

Winfried Schulz (born in Berlin, Germany) is especially well known for his many publications in the field of political communication. He has been influential over decades not only on the direction of research in political communication but on the methodological developments of the field in Germany. His work has been unconventional but tenacious. He has focused on empirical methods since his dissertation when he explored the role of experiments in social sciences. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Mainz, Germany. His advisor was Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. From 1972 until 1975 he was assistant professor at the University of Mainz. From 1975 until 1976 he worked as a research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1977 to 1983 he was a professor of communication at the University of Münster, Germany. From 1983 until 2004 he was chair of the Department of Communication at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, until he became Professor Emeritus in 2004. Schulz has worked with content analysis when the method was not quite established in Germany and thus introduced, popularized, and developed the method. He was one of the first to apply the method of content analysis not only to the print media but to film and radio as well. With his many contributions he has triggered further debate of the research content, and he enriched the methodological developments.

There are three primary areas Schulz has focused on: news selection and media reality, changes of media systems, and media reception and media effects.

[Page 735]The construction of reality has been his focus of attention at various times. Schulz was in charge of many content analyses exploring this topic. His publication The Construction of Reality in the News Media: An Analysis of Contemporary News Coverage (1976) is a milestone in political communication research. Schulz suggests that media do not simply reflect reality but they (re-)construct it. With this publication, he not only expanded previous research on news factors, but he laid the foundation and thus triggered the European research on news factors.

With the liberalization of the broadcasting system in the 1980s and social changes in Eastern Europe, Schulz also focused more on media systems and their changes. One of his major research themes has been the effects of the media expansion on the viewer. With the growing competition between public and commercial channels in the mid-1990s, he focused on the quality of media content and on methods to measure quality. Another research theme was the changing media environment in Eastern Germany with the reunification. Already during the first changes and well before the official reunification, Schulz had been interested in democratization processes in the former GDR. He was involved in a study about regional elections in 1990 in Leipzig, Eastern Germany, concentrating on the actual development of a democratic culture in political communication. He investigated how far the political communication process already worked under the new circumstances. His interest and involvement in Eastern countries and media systems has been rewarded by the Charles University, Prague, with an honorary doctorate.

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