MASS MEDIA IN DIVIDED GERMANY 565
their reports often referred back to the churches and dissidents, and the
journalists tested the reaction of the SED to what they were saying. More-
over, these journalists sought to strengthen dissident groups by acting
as a protective shield, but sometimes these eff orts backfi red.^53 The cor-
respondents smuggled texts and documents, as well as photos and fi lms,
from dissidents back to the West, where they were then published with
a GDR audience in mind. For example, the East German photographer
Ludwig Rauch, who had been banned from publishing since 1986, se-
cretly sold his images in West Germany, and they then appeared without
his knowledge in magazines such as Stern. The Stasi was aware of these
practices, but generally tolerated them at times in the 1980s.
For the most part, the West German correspondents wrote about po-
litical aff airs related to German-German relations that therefore aff ected
the FRG. They tended to ignore aspects of everyday life in the GDR, per-
haps because it seemed to be rather static, which made it anything but
newsworthy in the West.^54 Despite conversations with the churches and
dissidents, their main sources of information remained the GDR media
and offi cial SED statements. Furthermore, the West German correspon-
dents did not have a monopoly on the reporting on the GDR because
their reports were often augmented with information coming from for-
eign news agencies.
In reverse, West Germany became less signifi cant for the GDR press.
Most of their articles were primarily designed to sing the praises of their
own society and that of their socialist brothers. The percentage of articles
covering the West in general in the two most important SED papers, Neues
Deutschland and Junge Welt, sank to just 20 percent, whereas the FRG ac-
counted for only about 5 percent of the news reports. In terms of content,
most of these reports on the West were critical in tone. Nevertheless, the
critique of West Germany in Neues Deutschland and Junge Welt actually
declined in the mid-1980s.^55 Quite apparently, Honecker’s planned state
visit as well as the tighter socioeconomic entanglements between the two
Germanys had begun to have an eff ect on the media coverage.
Television and Radio before 1989
Although it was strictly prohibited to import newspapers and magazines
from the West into the GDR, which minimized the infl uence of these print
media outlets, it was much more diffi cult for the GDR to keep radio and
television programming out of the country by virtue of the fact that radio
waves pay no respect to national borders. For this reason, there were
probably not many areas in which the asymmetrical entanglements be-