572 FRANK BÖSCH AND CHRISTOPH CLASSEN
aired on West German television, and a similar development—although
more latent—also took place in the GDR. As early as the 1970s, the per-
centage of imported television series from Western Europe and America
broadcast on East German television was about 40 percent. By the end of
the 1980s, there were more U.S. productions being aired in the GDR than
television fi lms from the Soviet Union.^81 In the 1970s, the direct contacts
and program trading between the GDR and West Germany also began
to increase. In particular, fi lm rights were sold across the border in both
directions, especially since the GDR moved into the synchronization mar-
ket on a massive scale at the end of the 1980s in order to draw more for-
eign currency into the country.^82 The exchange of news images, however,
went only one way: the socialist states consistently drew much of their
image material from the Western Eurovision network, but the (carefully
selected) images off ered by the Eastern Intervision did not attract much
interest in the West.^83
The preferences of viewers, in contrast, did not diff er all that much be-
tween East and West. On both sides of the Wall, mysteries, sports, fi lms,
and entertainment shows were very popular, just as they were in other
European industrialized states. Accordingly, media use was more heavily
infl uenced by the need for relaxation and balance in both countries than
by the respective political systems. Moreover, East and West Germans
shared an interest in “as little news and information as seemed to be
necessary,”^84 as well as a desire for counseling and orientation, which
was also off ered by the similarly popular service shows. Interestingly,
the GDR public turned its back even more on “hard” political content in
the 1980s than ever before: the viewer quotas for the main news show
Aktuelle Kamera sank from around 15 percent in the 1970s to not more
than 10 percent in the decade that followed, and far fewer tuned into Der
Schwarze Kanal.^85 Young people in particular seemed to be distancing
themselves from GDR television coverage. As indicated by GDR research
surveys in the 1980s, they clearly showed a preference for media from
the West, even for political information, while the credibility of the GDR
media continued to drop.^86
The increasing popularity of entertainment shows was also refl ected
in the growth in the number of series and genre productions in both Ger-
manys. The public competitors ARD and ZDF, for example, added more
mysteries, westerns, and science fi ction series, as well as movies, to their
evening line-ups from the 1970s onward. Faced with the prospect of the
competition that was going to come from private television, they tried
to preempt potential losses in ratings by airing American series such as
Dallas (which ARD began broadcasting in 1982) and Dynasty (which had
been shown on ZDF from 1983). The silent competition of ARD and ZDF