146 | Mass Media and Historical Change
The media of the conquered nations Japan and Germany experienced an
especially great upheaval. The victorious Western powers aimed to instrumen-
talise them in two ways as an aid to establishing democracy: they would teach
people democratic mores by their content and format, and also by their liberal
structure that had no state affiliations. In Japan, which was de facto occu-
pied by the United States alone, the Americans applied elements of their own
media model. They abolished the previous state monopoly and established a
dual system in the individual prefectures that consisted of nationwide public
programming financed by fees and commercial radio financed by advertis-
ing. The competition was intended to prevent any monopolisation of opinion
building. In like manner the occupiers promoted American reporting formats
such as interviews with the citizenry in order to make radio content more
democratic (Saito, in Gunaratne 2000: 563; White 2005: 85). The transfor-
mation of the press was more short lived: although the introduction of press
freedom ushered in a brief period when numerous new papers flourished, it
was only a few years before the established publishers reasserted themselves
and the newspaper landscape became concentrated in fewer hands.
The new media order in West Germany was similar in structure but con-
siderably more complicated. At first the four Allied Powers worked together,
but after a short time they proceeded in different ways. According to an agree-
ment made in November 1944, all the German media were prohibited and
only Allied media were published at first. In a second step, Germans were
allowed to have licensed print media under Allied supervision, with the licens-
ees having to undergo a background check (Koszyk, in Wilke 1999: 32). This
complicated system of reorganisation and control shows what great signifi-
cance the Allies attributed to the media in the process of ‘re-education’.
Historians have long rejected the concept of ‘Zero Hour’, since lon-
ger-range changes or continuities still played a dominant role in 1945. As far
as the media are concerned, however, this concept is considered at least partly
justified, since changes here were fundamental (Frei and Schmitz 1999: 184).
Yet the scope of these historic media changes was quite varied. In the Western
Zones many publishers and publicists with a shady past had to cease work,
at least until 1948/49, or keep a low profile by working for small newspa-
pers. Managers of leading NSDAP papers generally made a complete change,
moving to related fields like advertising. This opened up great career oppor-
tunities for young, unencumbered publishers like Rudolf Augstein and Axel
Springer, who had hitherto scarcely been prominent as journalists, although
Springer at least came from a Hamburg publishing family (cf. Schwarz 2008:
93–128). At the same time, however, recent case studies have revealed that
there was greater continuity in the personnel of the middle-class press and
radio, and that professional experience counted for more than having a clean
political vest. An analysis of 308 postwar journalists in Hamburg revealed a