The changing election coverage of German television. A content analysis: 1990–2002

Abstract

The article reports considerable changes in the content and style of German election coverage between 1990 and 2002. The findings are based on a content analysis of the main evening news of the four major television channels, spanning four Bundestag elections. During the observation period, television has immensely expanded its coverage of the top candidates. While the presence of the candidates in the news increased, they were not able to get their issues across to the audience. The news discourse was narrowed down to election and campaigning as issues. Matters of campaigning style, the 'game schema', as well as election polls became increasingly salient. The number of sound bites grew, although the average sound bite length decreased slightly. The presentation of the candidates became more vivid and more colorful, and, thus, more attractive for the audience. On the other hand, there are no signs of increasing negativism. The observable trends in the scope and kind of presentation of candidates can be interpreted as increasing personalization and dramatization of media coverage. The changes partially fit into the pattern of convergence (i. e., a mutual assimilation of public and commercial channels). These developments are partly rooted in the change of the German television market. Other results can be explained by historical incidents such as the German unification in 1990, and by the candidate constellation during each election. In spite of some similarities with developments in the US, the authors argue that it would be misleading to label the observable changes of German election coverage as 'Americanization'.

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

“…The results of our study point to several missed opportunities for a more deliberative journalistic construction of the 2009 federal election campaign in Germany. In sum, the television news discourse of the election was dominated by a depiction of the campaign as a strategic game-a result that is consistent with prior findings (Genz et al, 2001;Schulz & Zeh, 2005. This campaign transpired against the backdrop of a stable lead in the polls by the ultimately successful conservative-liberal camp.…”

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

“…In sum, the television news discourse of the election was dominated by a depiction of the campaign as a strategic game-a result that is consistent with prior findings (Genz et al, 2001;Schulz Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 22:59 17 November 2014& Zeh, 2005. This campaign transpired against the backdrop of a stable lead in the polls by the ultimately successful conservative-liberal camp.…”

The Impact of Melodramatic News Coverage on Information Recall and Comprehension

“…The former refers to news that focus on private, personal, and concrete affairs rather than public, social, or abstract issues (e.g., Bas and Grabe 2015;Karvonen 2010;Rahat and Sheafer 2007;Schulz and Zeh 2005). The latter concerns both the description or depiction of emotional states and the use of audiovisual resources aimed at exacerbating emotional reactions such as empathy and sorrow (e.g., Bas and Grabe 2015;Grabe, Zhou, and Barnett 2001;Grabe et al 2000).…”

“…Indeed, given the particularities of audiovisual language, personalization brings a sense of intimacy (Fuenzalida 2002) that might provoke emotional contagion-the emotional convergence between the audience and the people on screen-and identification with the experiences portrayed . While personalization has been operationalized in multiple ways, including information about private lives (Van Zoonen 2005), number of facts reported about people (Pellegrini et al 2011), and human factors, that is, the centrality of personal stories (Schulz 1996), there is consistent evidence of increasing personalization in news coverage of public issues, especially politics and crime news (e.g., Karvonen 2010;Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001;Lo and Cheng 2015;Schulz and Zeh 2005;Thussu 2008). Critics, however, argue that personalization fixates on oversimplified archetypes-including the common melodramatic character types (Alatorre 1986;Real 2001).…”