MASS MEDIA IN DIVIDED GERMANY 553
the media in the GDR, especially in light of the competition coming from
the West.^6 Nowadays, however, researchers have come to appreciate the
increasing media response to the wishes of the public and Western in-
fl uence, which allowed more entertainment and service programming
off ered by GDR television in particular to enjoy a stronger resonance.^7
Additionally, some studies have argued that the GDR developed a certain
kind of national identity that coalesced around its television program-
ming from the 1970s onward.^8 Such debates about the social impact of
media, and especially its growing signifi cance as an everyday consumer
good, have helped to develop an eff ective lens for comparing the history
of the media in East and West.
Separate Worlds? East and West German Print Media
in the 1970s and 1980s
Great diff erences existed between the print media in the two Germanys,
and the exchange between the two appears to have been rather limited
at fi rst glance. Whereas the newspaper landscape blossomed in Western
Europe from the 1950s onward, featuring everything from small local
papers to tabloids full of pictures and a critical highbrow press, standard
newspapers in the East consisted of thin party papers with tightly printed
pages full of success stories coming from the socialist world and slurs di-
rected against the West. Perhaps the most glaring diff erences were to be
found in the freedom of the press. In the wake of the Spiegel aff air, state
press laws were passed in West Germany in the mid-1960s that protected
the investigative work of journalists by granting them special rights. The
constitution of the GDR upheld the freedom of opinion in Article 27 (“The
freedom of the press, the radio, and television is guaranteed”), but this
was undermined by the SED’s claim to leadership. The SED controlled
the press through its license requirements and control over the distribu-
tion of paper, its selection and training of journalists, its censorship of
the media, its interference in careers, and central regulations. Whereas
the press was primarily privately owned in the West, and the Kartellamt
(the West German antitrust authority) sought to prevent monopolies, the
daily papers in the East were put out only by the SED, the bloc parties,
and mass organizations, with the notable exception of the church press.
In particular, the agitation department of the Central Committee of the
SED and the press offi ce of the chairman of the Council of Ministers con-
trolled the news in the country through written directives and regular
meetings with the editors-in-chief of the SED papers in Berlin.^9 The news
agency ADN and the newspaper Neues Deutschland also disseminated