Media and media criticism in Germany: The crisis of the Fourth Estate
The growing gap between public opinion and published opinion
This article was first published in French and Spanish by Le Monde diplomatique in March 2024. An abridged German version was published by Taz. Die Tageszeitung.
In early April, a group of journalists from public broadcasters, supported by intellectuals, published a manifesto, in which they denounced the limitation of diversity and the defamation of dissenters in German public media and called for a profound structural reform. Media pundits and outlets dismissed the criticism out of hand, without responding to the detailed list of arguments and proposed reforms. The German Journalists Association DJV even associated the manifesto with right wing politics, although there is no trace of evidence for this.
The reaction is rather typical of the German media landscape. The German sociologist Harald Welzer made a similar experience when he, together with the philosopher Richard David Precht, published a book in 2022 entitled The Fourth Power. How Majority Opinion Is Made, even if It Isn't, which became a bestseller. Their findings: German leading media are increasingly focusing on opinion-making instead of differentiated reporting on topics such as the war in Ukraine and are taking one-sided positions. The gap between published opinion and actual public opinion is widening. The depreciating comments on the book began even before it was published, and the weekly magazine Der Stern accused the authors of playing into the hands of the right-wing narrative of an alleged “fake press”.
“Media criticism,” says Welzer, “is to the media what ornithology is to birds: The birds just ignore it.” In fact, many media representatives react in an extremely thin-skinned way to criticism, especially if it is of a fundamental nature. Structural criticism that goes beyond individual scandals is quickly associated with right-wing conspiracy ideologies, even if, as in Welzer's case, it comes from the left-liberal side.
However, there is certainly cause for a critical self-reflection. According to communications researcher Uwe Krüger from the University of Leipzig, the theory of a representation gap between public and published opinion cannot be dismissed out of hand. An analysis of articles in the leading German media on the war in Ukraine showed that voices in favor of the delivery of heavy weapons and against diplomatic initiatives had by far the largest presence in the leading media. In contrast, according to surveys conducted during the same period, around half of the German population rejected such arms deliveries and more than half wanted more diplomacy.1
According to Krüger, a militaristic bias in the German media landscape is not a new phenomenon. Whether it was the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, which violated international law and involved Germany, or the Bundeswehr's deployment in Afghanistan: as detailed analyses have shown, the vast majority of editorials in the leading German media were always in favor, while the majority of the population was against.2 After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, media pressure ultimately contributed to a radical change in German foreign policy: the ruling Social Democratic Party largely abandoned the legacy of the policy of détente from the Willy Brandt era.3
Transatlantic networks in the German media
Krüger made a name for himself in 2013 with a dissertation in which he examined the embedding of leading German journalists in transatlantic think tanks. He showed that top journalists, including Stefan Kornelius, then head of the foreign policy department of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Josef Joffe, long-time co-editor of the weekly Die Zeit, Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger, then head of the foreign policy department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and the then editor-in-chief of Bild-Zeitung Kai Dieckmann, were and in some cases still are members of various transatlantic think tanks such as the Atlantic Bridge, the Trilateral Commission or the Aspen Institute, without disclosing this in their newspapers. A frame and content analysis revealed that the publications of these top journalists consistently corresponded to the pro-US and pro-NATO positions of these organizations.4 Even the deputy editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Bernd Ulrich, conceded that the transatlantic networks were a “transmission belt for the American way of thinking in foreign policy”.5
The case of Jochen Bittner was particularly noteworthy: in 2013, as a participant in the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Zeit journalist had contributed to a strategy paper for German security policy, which in turn served as the basis for a speech by then Federal President Joachim Gauck at the Munich Security Conference. It was not only controversial that a journalist had helped to formulate German security policy on behalf of a US think tank, but also that he subsequently hailed Gauck's speech as a “sensation” in Die Zeit without disclosing his dual function.6 The speech called for greater German military involvement in the world.
Krüger's study became known throughout Germany through its inclusion in the comedy show Die Anstalt on German public television channel ZDF, which provided one of the rare bright spots of media criticism on German television. But despite the waves that the study and the show made at the time, and despite the failed lawsuits filed by the criticized journalists, research on this topic was not continued, neither at Krüger's institute nor elsewhere. The media editors of the major newspapers and broadcasters have also not pursued the topic any further since then.
However, the question of whether and how transatlantic networks influence reporting is highly topical in view of the dangers of escalation from the Ukraine war to the Middle East and China, and is no less explosive than the question of the influence of Russian propaganda. This is all the more true as not only top journalists are closely connected to these networks, but also parts of the political elite, including the current Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (The Greens), who is both a member of the Atlantik-Brücke and a former fellow of the German Marshall Fund.
Going with the flow: a dangerous business
However, being embedded in elite networks is by no means the only cause of potential distortions in reporting. Falling circulations, declining advertising customers and competition by quick and free information from the Internet have also profoundly changed the media industry in German-speaking countries in recent decades. Sabine Schiffer, founder of the Institute for Media Responsibility in Erlangen and professor at the Hochschule für Medien in Frankfurt am Main, points out that for many journalists, their work has become much more precarious. Courageously swimming against the tide is much more difficult today, and opportunists in particular are making a career for themselves.
What's more: In the hunt for clicks, once renowned newspapers are surfing waves of outrage on social media such as Twitter/X to increase their reach. This not only reinforces the echo chambers of a relatively small group of influencers who are anything but representative of public opinion; they also repeatedly spread unchecked conjecture as fact.
This wave has now also reached the public broadcasters, which are actually financially independent of click numbers and ratings. For example, on the night of November 15-16, 2022, the ZDF tweeted: “Russian missiles hit Polish territory” - although at the time it was not at all known where the missile debris that hit the small town of Przewódow in eastern Poland had come from. Leading German government politicians, including Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Chairwoman of the Defense Committee, quickly spread the news. The NATO correspondent of the Austrian Standard, the country's leading “newspaper of record”, even wrote on Twitter/X (post now deleted): “Putin [...] is obviously looking for a major confrontation with Europe. We have to prepare for war, as unimaginable as that seems.” It later turned out that the missile had been fired by the Ukrainian military.
The carelessness with which this hoax was spread is remarkable, even though the news of a Russian missile hitting NATO territory could possibly trigger an casus foederis. There was no official apology from the editorial offices; the ZDF simply tacitly changed the headline of its article while the politicians deleted their tweets.7
Concentration of ownership and groupthink
A public debate about undesirable developments in the media cannot take place without the media themselves. And they are naturally reluctant to deal with their own missteps. However, one would think that competition would have a corrective function here: The incorrect or inadequate reporting of one medium should actually be a steep opportunity for the competition to act as a corrective. But this is precisely where one of the problems lies. Diversity in the major German media is in decline. Although the concentration of ownership in the national press has not yet reached the extreme forms seen in the UK or the USA, a massive concentration process has also taken place here over the last few decades: In the daily press sector, 57 percent of the market share is held by the ten largest media groups; in the case of newspapers that are not available by subscription but only on free sale, for example tabloids, the concentration is even higher than 98 percent.8 The situation is similar in the weekly newspaper sector, with just under 63 percent of consumer magazines in the hands of five groups. The majority of these market-dominating groups are in turn partly or wholly owned by a small group of billionaires or near-billionaires, including the Mohn family (Bertelsmann/RTL/Gruner und Jahr), Springer/Döpfner (Bild, Welt, etc.), Holtzbrinck (Die Zeit, Tagesspiegel, etc.), Schaub (Medien-Union/Süddeutsche Zeitung, etc.), Burda (Focus, etc.) and Becker/Marx/Wilcke (Funke Group). In more than two thirds of all districts and cities, a single group even has a monopoly on daily newspapers, for example in Cologne, Nuremberg, Freiburg and Leipzig, most of the Ruhr region, the state capitals of Stuttgart, Hanover, Wiesbaden, Magdeburg, Mainz, Kiel and Erfurt, and even an entire federal state, Saarland.
Although owners rarely interfere in the daily editorial work, they appoint the editors-in-chief and budgets and thus exert considerable influence on the editorial line. In a country where most of the media are owned by billionaires, it is hardly surprising that one reads little about how their excessive wealth could be alleviated through taxes or socialization in order to restructure the tight public budgets. On the contrary: in 2002, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt even became media partners of the lobby organization “Stiftung Familienunternehmen” (Foundation for Family Businesses) in a campaign to abolish legacy taxes.9 The entanglement of the media and big business is hardly ever discussed in public discourse.
However, ownership is not the only factor that restricts diversity of opinion and critical self-reflection. According to Harald Welzer, the leading media, even if they belong to competing companies, are moving ever closer together on certain topics and developing a kind of esprit de corps, which the social psychologist Irving Janis once described as groupthink.
In the early 1970s, Janis researched how pressure to conform could lead to fatal mistakes in elites, from the failed US invasion of the Bay of Pigs in Cuba to the escalation of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.10 Membership of a particular in-group is given greater weight in decision-making situations than clear thinking and ethical standards. Differing points of view and alternative solution strategies are ignored and even fought against as a threat to the group.
This tendency towards groupthink was not only evident in the Ukraine war, but also in the German media during the coronavirus pandemic. Although there was a certain amount of room for debate, critics of certain government measures such as lockdowns, school closures and 2G measures were repeatedly dismissed by some leading media outlets as “corona deniers” or “covidiots”, even when they put forward serious arguments. Philosopher Richard David Precht, for example, was labeled a dangerous “muddlehead” by Der Spiegel because he pointed out that the long-term side effects of the new form of vaccination were unpredictable due to the lack of long-term studies - a scientific truism. For Heribert Prantl, a member of the editorial board of Süddeutsche Zeitung until 2019, these disparagements of critics were a gross mistake and an abuse of press freedom. “Journalists should debate with arguments, not with verbal abuse,” Prantl told me. To the extent that pejorative labeling displaced debate with arguments, differentiation in reporting on critics of measures dwindled in favour of a binary world view that only knew good and evil.11 Blatantly authoritarian tendencies also became acceptable. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, published a large-scale essay by the writer Thomas Brussig with the entirely serious title “Mehr Diktatur wagen” (Daring more dictatorship) - for Prantl, who is also a lawyer, not only a journalistic transgression, but also a clearly unconstitutional statement. Die Zeit ran the headline: “Discrimination against the unvaccinated is ethically justified” and the well-known ZDF TV comedian Jan Böhmermann even went so far as to compare unvaccinated children with rats that spread the virus.12
Heribert Prantl's conclusion: at a time when the powers of the state, from the executive to the legislature to the judiciary, were unanimously enforcing massive restrictions on fundamental rights, the fourth estate of the media should have intervened as a corrective. But this was hardly ever the case.
The war in Gaza offers another example of a disturbing convergence of mass media and state power. The blatantly false claim by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (November 14, 2023), for example, that the Netanyahu government is adhering to international law and human rights in its bombardments in Gaza and that all claims to the contrary are “absurd”, has received hardly any criticism in the leading German media. On the other hand, critics of Israel's actions in Gaza and Germany’s support for them are regularly branded as Israel haters or even anti-Semites in the German media. Daniel Bax, editor of the daily newspaper Taz, summed up the situation three months after the start of the Gaza war as follows: “Many journalists in this country see themselves primarily as guardians of the ‘reason of state’. They are more concerned with condemning dissenting opinions than questioning Germany's solidarity with Israel. Instead of informing their readers, they proselytize. They fail as the fourth estate.”
The rise of the right and the marginalization of media criticism
But when did the trend towards groupthink begin in Germany and why? Uwe Krüger noticed a clear change in Germany between 2013 and 2015. Until then, he had criticized fundamental undesirable developments in the media landscape without hesitation, but since then he has been more cautious about what he says in public. The reason: media criticism is now easily associated with right-wing conspiracy theories.
In 2013, the then right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was founded, which is now the second strongest party in Germany according to polls. In 2014, the equally right-wing movement “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident” (Pegida) emerged, which received enormous media attention, although it was generally unable to mobilize more than a few thousand people. The Pegida demonstrations spread the catchphrase “Lügenpresse” (“fake press”) - a term with a long and varied history. After the German Revolution in 1848, it was mainly used by conservatives against liberal and left-wing media, sometimes with an anti-Semitic slant. During the First World War, it was used to discredit the foreign press from a German perspective, a tradition that was later continued by the Nazis. However, the term was also used by the labor movement to castigate anti-union propaganda by large media corporations and by exiled authors to denounce the Nazi press.
To the extent that right-wing forces have hijacked this term again since the beginning of the 21st century and increasingly since 2014, radical media criticism has become a mined area. It was all too easy to be associated with right-wing conspiracy theories.
This situation encouraged a fatal polarization: while right-wing circles were able to occupy the field of media criticism more and more, leading media outlets formed a kind of siege mentality and immunized themselves against criticism by staging themselves as defenders of the liberal order against the right-wing mob. Fundamental criticism of the functioning of mass media was increasingly caught between these fronts.
Looking back: From the Frankfurt School to the “intellectual-moral turnaround”
The precarious situation of media criticism in Germany did not just begin in the past decade. From the post-war period until the 1980s, an often Marxist-inspired media analysis flourished at numerous universities, dealing with ownership relations, critique of ideology and the dark sides of the culture industry. Authors from the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse had a formative influence on the period. In 1962, Jürgen Habermas published his influential habilitation thesis “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere”. His diagnosis: the comparatively open culture of debate in the middle of the 19th century had been replaced by a “refeudalization” of the public sphere with the rise of oligopolistic mass media and public relations.
This was also the time of critical writers who did not shy away from taking on large media corporations. For example, Nobel Prize winner Heinrich Böll, whose bestselling novel “The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum” (1974) was a frontal attack on the machinations of tabloid media such as the Bild newspaper, which in turn denounced him as a terrorist sympathizer.
However, criticism was not limited to the tabloids alone. Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, for example, had already deconstructed the “jargon” and the “scam” of the renowned news magazine Der Spiegel in a radio essay in 1957: In order to make a story out of everything, that is, a personalized and emotionally charged story, Der Spiegel, according to Enzensberger, had to “interpret, arrange, model, arrange the facts, but it must not admit it, must not show its colors. (...) I know of no publication that has gone further than Der Spiegel in the technique of suggestion, of letting things shine through, of insinuation. However, this technique does not shed light on the truth, but rather paralyzes it.” Der Spiegel printed this scathing criticism itself – a process of self-reflection for which one usually searches in vain for parallels today.
Later, in 1968, tens of thousands of students took to the streets to demonstrate against the Axel Springer Group's one-sidedly pro-American coverage of the Vietnam War and the defamation of opponents of the war. Their demand: “Expropriate Springer”. The concentration of ownership in the media sector was highlighted as a central obstacle to a diverse and critical press. However, as it became clear that the demands for expropriation would not be successful, many left-wingers turned to founding alternative media, including the daily newspaper Taz, which was founded in 1978.
But times were soon to change. With the “intellectual and moral turnaround” propagated by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1980s – inspired by the conservative governments under Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK – emancipatory media criticism began to be pushed back. This is exemplified by the way in which the communications faculty at the Free University of Berlin, then a leader in the field of media criticism, was “reversed”. On Helmut Kohl's initiative, a commission of experts led by communication scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was convened to ensure that vacant chairs were no longer filled by left-wing professors. The embarrassing fact: Noelle-Neumann had been the author of the weekly magazine Das Reich, published by Joseph Goebbels, from 1940 to 1943.13
The neoconservative rollback also took place in the media landscape itself. With the help of his friend and media mogul Leo Kirch, Helmut Hohl pushed for the introduction of private television in order to counter what he perceived as too much left-wing influence in public broadcasting. The establishment of the first private channels in the Orwellian year 1984 ultimately gave private capital considerably more influence on the formation of public opinion and exposed the public media to pressure to adapt, which ultimately led to a creeping tabloidization of the public broadcasters. Critical documentaries and investigative formats, for example, were gradually cut back in broadcasting time, shifted to late-night programming and finally to Arte, which has far fewer viewers - in favor of talk shows, crime dramas and sports. The Interstate Broadcasting Treaties, which form the basis of public service broadcasting in Germany, say nothing about audience ratings, but it does mention an educational mandate. However, they are doing less and less justice to this, as the initiative of communication scientists for an “audience council” and a reform of public broadcasting complains.
For Harald Welzer, the neoliberal restructuring of society since the 1980s has led to a decline in critical thinking as a whole. In the media, political parties and even many universities, there is now, according to him, a “complete lack of theory when it comes to analysing the present”. In particular, a critique of ideology is lacking that would be capable of making material and power-political interests visible behind rhetorical masks. The very foundations of structural media criticism are thus eroded.
Nevertheless, according to Sabine Schiffer, there is still a broad spectrum of qualified media criticism in German civil society. The problem today is not so much that serious media criticism as a whole has disappeared, but that it is largely ignored by the leading media. Her conclusion: “If you ignore the constructive forces of media criticism, you will reap the destructive ones.”
Fabian Scheidler is the author of the book “The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization,” which has been translated into numerous languages. As a journalist he writes for Le Monde diplomatique, Berliner Zeitung, Taz, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Reporterre and many others. In 2009, he received the Otto Brenner Media Prize for critical journalism. www.fabianscheidler.com
Harald Welzer, Leo Keller: Die veröffentlichte Meinung. Eine Inhaltsanalyse der deutschen Medienberichterstattung zum Ukrainekrieg, https://www.fischerverlage.de/magazin/neue-rundschau/die-veroeffentlichte-meinung. When the question of whether Germany should supply heavy weapons to Ukraine was raised in spring 2022, 45% were in favor and 45% against, according to ARD Deutschlandtrend. In March 2023, 53% of Germans said that diplomatic efforts to end the war did not go far enough for them.
Christine Eilders, Albrecht Lüter: Gab es eine Gegenöffentlichkeit während des Kosovo-Krieges? Eine vergleichende Analyse der Deutungsrahmen im deutschen Mediendiskurs, in: Ulrich Albrecht and Jörg Becker (eds.), Medien zwischen Krieg und Frieden, Baden-Baden: Nomos 2002. Adrian Pohr: Indexing im Einsatz. Eine Inhaltsanalyse der Kommentare überregionaler Tageszeitungen in Deutschland zum Afghanistankrieg 2001, in: Medien und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 2-3, 2005.
SPD Chairman Lars Klingbeil, for example, said that the central maxim of SPD foreign policy, that security and stability in Europe can only be achieved with and not against Russia, no longer applies: “Today it's about organizing security from Russia.”
Uwe Krüger: Meinungsmacht. Der Einfluss von Eliten auf Leitmedien und Alpha-Journalisten – eine kritische Netzwerkanalyse. Herbert von Halem Verlag, Cologne 2013
Bernd Ulrich: Sagt uns die Wahrheit, Kiepenheuer und Witsch 2015, p. 47 f.
After Krüger's study led to massive criticism of the fact that Bittner had not disclosed his dual role, Die Zeit subsequently added a corresponding comment.
Bernhard Pörksen: Igniting tweets and dangerous sentences, Zeit Online, 19.11.2022,
Horst Röper: Zeitungsmarkt 2022: weniger Wettbewerb bei steigender Konzentration. Daten zur Konzentration der Tagespresse im I. Quartal 2022. Media Perspectives (6): 295-318. https://www.ard-media.de/fileadmin/user_upload/media-perspectives/pdf/2022/2206_Roeper.pdf
Harald Schumann: Beenden wir das Rattenrennen! Was kritischer Journalismus heute bedeutet, in: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 3/2018
Irving Janis: Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1972
Cf. Precht/Welzer p. 84f. and 150. A study by the University of Mainz on reporting during the pandemic shows that weighing up the benefits and negative consequences of measures was extremely rare. So-called “corona sceptics” were only mentioned in 1.6% of the articles, and the reporting was dominated by politicians in favor of measures. Cf. Marcus Maurer et al.: Einseitig, unkritisch, regierungsnah? Eine empirische Studie zur Qualität der journalistischen Berichterstattung über die Corona-Pandemie, Rudolf Augstein Foundation, October 2021.