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Abstract

This chapter argues that, in spite of the economic crisis that has affected the media in Germany, the infrastructure of the German media system is still suited to providing for accountability journalism as a core element of the democratic constitution of society. The conditions for journalism are still more favourable than in some other Western countries, due to stable market structures, policy provisions for public service broadcasting and a media culture heavily influenced by the idea of a public sphere as a critical forum for debate about issues of common concern. There are, however, pressures that will likely aggravate in the long run if left unresponded to. This chapter identifies five countermeasures pursued by German media organisations to tackle the challenges of declining revenues from traditional advertising, shifting audience preferences, and the internet. As a complementary strategy, German publishers have drawn up a wish list of media policy responses designed to improve general framework conditions of the press, and they lobby very hard in Berlin and Brussels for their implementation at the national and European level. Assessing the overall scope of the current difficulties the chapter concludes that we are observing a ‘strategic crisis of newspaper publishers’ but no general media crisis, and certainly no crisis of democracy in Germany.

Esser, Frank; Brüggemann, Michael (2010): The Strategic Crisis of German Newspapers. In David A. L. Levy, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen (Eds.): The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy. Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, pp. 39–54. Available online at https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/changing-business-journalism-and-its-implications-democracy.

Abstract

The European Union (EU) has a problem with its citizens. For about fifty years the political elites have pursued the agenda of political and economic integration, while the broader public remained uninformed and by and large uninterested in what was happening in Brussels. This mode of governance has clearly shown its limits: when the citizens were asked whether they support the plan to introduce a constitutional treaty in June 2005, fifty-five percent of the French voters said “Non” and sixty-five percent of the Dutch “Nee”. In June 2008, fifty-three percent of the Irish voters rejected the Lisbon Treaty, the follow-up to the constitutional treaty, and in 2009 the European Parliament (EP) suffered a record weak election turnout. This came as no surprise, considering that barely every second EU-citizen knew that he or she can vote for the EP (in fall 2007, 48 percent of the respondents knew that they can vote) (CEC, 2008a: 10).

Brüggemann, Michael (2010): Public Relations between Propaganda and the Public Sphere. The Information Policy of the European Commission. In Chiara Valentini, Giorgia Nesti (Eds.): Public Communication in the European Union. History, Perspectives and Challenges. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 67–92.