558 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
gime, the GDR made a radical eff ort to recouple the press and the party.
The daily newspapers in the GDR were tightly linked to the SED, the few
permitted politically independent bloc parties, and mass organizations.
The SED published seventeen newspapers, while the GDR bloc parties
CDU (Christian Democratic Union) and LDPD (Liberal Democratic Party
of Germany) put out fi ve, and the NDPD (National-Democratic Party of
Germany) put out six smaller papers, but the content was very similar
across the board. All of these papers appeared in numerous local edi-
tions. They were not present in all counties, but they were quite strong
in some.^24 The content of these papers was largely determined by the
respective leading journalists and political constellations.^25 But, above all,
it was the news agency ADN that played a key role in the distribution of
news throughout the country. Even the two papers with the highest cir-
culation, Neues Deutschland and Freie Erde, cited the news agency as the
source of almost half of their articles.^26 Characteristically, the structure
of the daily press in the GDR remained extremely static in the 1970s and
1980s.
In West Germany, on the other hand, the end of the 1960s brought a
politicization and polarization of the press that was part of a more funda-
mental transformation in the meantime. The large party papers and the
press outlets that were close to specifi c parties collapsed in the 1960s,
marking the end of a dominant German tradition that had existed since
the nineteenth century. The SPD was hit particularly hard by this tran-
sition. Even in major cities such as Berlin, it either had to shut down its
once popular party papers (such as Telegraf and Nachtdepesche in 1972),
sell them (like the Hamburger Morgenpost in 1981), or, as in the case of
the Neue Hannoversche Presse, merge with the bourgeois competition.
One alternative for the SPD was to sell some of its shares in publications.
This was more lucrative economically, but it also meant giving up some
political infl uence.^27 Likewise, the 1960s also saw the decline of the con-
fessional papers that were close to the CDU, such as Christ und Welt and
Rheinischer Merkur.
At the same time, the Western press was caught up in a process of
political polarization in which previously independent newspapers and
magazines began to cater more closely to a particular party line.^28 While
the weeklies Die ZEIT, Der Spiegel, and Stern moved closer to the SPD, the
newspapers BILD and FAZ, as well as some illustrated magazines, more
clearly threw their support behind the Christian Democrats. In contrast to
the British (tabloid) press, they refrained from openly and directly cam-
paigning for the parties during election, but they did lean more heavily
toward political education in their reporting.^29 The tone of articles became
sharper, and campaigns directed at political “opponents”—for example,