MASS MEDIA IN DIVIDED GERMANY 559
against the SPD chairman and federal chancellor Willy Brandt, or the CSU
chairman and minister-president of Bavaria Franz Josef Strauß—became
part of the daily agenda. Correspondingly, the number of journalists who
were party members also increased in the West as part of this polariza-
tion process in the 1970s. In particular, however, conservative politicians
and political advisors, such as Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, charged that
since the 1970s the majority of journalists had been leaning to the left,
which seemed to have infl uenced their reporting.^30 Others complained
of the dominance of conservatives, fi rst and foremost in the guise of the
Springer publishing house.^31
Accordingly, the neutrality and objectivity of the media was not only
discussed in the GDR, but also was critically assessed in West Germany,
especially in regard to the BILD newspaper. Books such as Die verlorene
Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum), written by
the prominent author Heinrich Böll in 1974, or the undercover report Der
Aufmacher (Lead Story) put together by the investigative journalist Günter
Wallraff about the reckless and made-up reports written by tabloid jour-
nalists, only further fueled the emotional fl ames of these debates. That
said, neither the readers of BILD nor those of Neues Deutschland should
be underestimated. As scholars of British cultural studies have already
shown in terms of the tabloid press, readers did not believe everything
that was printed in these papers, but rather they fi ltered this information
on their own, sometimes even with cynical jokes.^32
This polarization of the media and a new kind of attachment to the
political parties also appeared on the political margins in West Germany.
Right-wing extremist papers, for example, were becoming more popular
again in the 1970s. For instance, the radical right-wing Deutsche National-
Zeitung, which appeared weekly, achieved six-fi gure sales in copies sold.
It developed into a central forum and source of funding for the right-wing
extremist parties such as the DVU (German People’s Union) that fl our-
ished in the 1980s; the paper’s publisher, Gerhard Frey, was in fact the
chairman of the DVU.^33 The rise of the left-wing press was even more pro-
nounced. unsere zeit which began as a Communist daily paper in 1969,
achieved a circulation of about sixty thousand copies in the 1970s with
the help of the SED. The taz, a leftist-alternative West German paper fi rst
printed in 1979, emerged from the same milieu as the Green Party, which
got started around this time as well. The era of party-affi liated press out-
lets had not come to an end in West Germany around 1970; rather, it had
developed new contours.
One of the major changes within the West German press market in
the 1970s and 1980s was the sudden burst of the alternative press onto
the scene. By 1980, there were already 390 leftist-alternative newspa-