148 | Mass Media and Historical Change
on the BBC. It was to be financed by fees and administered by a board in
order to prevent a renewal of state influence. The governments of the German
states, however, quickly attempted to establish as much influence as possible
by filling directory boards and management posts with representatives of the
government and the political parties (Kutsch, in Wilke 1999: 73–79). In this
way the majority parties were able to influence staffing, political commentary
and critical satires (Rüden, in Rüden and Wagner 2005: 119f.).
From the 1950s onwards, media development in the German Federal
Republic once again followed international trends. The market for print media
declined everywhere. By 1974 newspapers in France had shrunk to half of
their postwar numbers, and in the same year in Great Britain the four biggest
publishers dominated two-thirds of the market (Kuhn 2002: 25; Williams
2010: 214). Thus these strong personalities in the publishing field were vicar-
ious representatives of the media’s power. Yet West German local papers that
had flourished after 1949 also began to die out after 1954. Although total
circulation actually grew during the 1950s, many counties now possessed
only a single local paper. From an economic standpoint, this can be explained
by technical innovation and rising labour costs. Seen from a historico-cul-
tural standpoint, altered local and religious identities had opened the way to
regional newspapers all could share. This both resulted from and fostered the
erosion of groupings based on differing religious and ideological views.
On the other hand, the market share of tabloids grew, and 1952 witnessed
the meteoric rise of the Bild Zeitung that patterned itself on British tabloids
like the Daily Mirror. Within a few years it had the highest circulation of any
paper in Europe. Until 1958 it almost completely eschewed political report-
ing and rarely took a stand on policies. Any political power it had during the
early days of the Federal Republic was on the local and regional level, and its
influence on national politics, even at a later date, has often been overrated
(Führer 2007: 10–14). In other countries, tabloid journalism first began gath-
ering steam in the 1960s: in Austria with the re-establishment of the Neue
Kronen-Zeitung, and in Switzerland with Blick. The extent to which tabloid
journalism was dependent on cultural influences can be seen in Italy where
high-circulation sports journals appeared rather than big tabloids. The losers
in this development were the papers of political parties and religious denom-
inations. This was not yet foreseeable in the aftermath of 1945. In many
countries, particularly the Netherlands, Austria, Italy and the German Federal
Republic, there was to a certain extent a re-establishment of denominational
or Social Democratic groupings that had their own print media to propagate
their ideas. This state of affairs largely came to an end at the beginning of
the 1960s. In Great Britain left-wing newspapers like the Daily Herald and
News Chronicle, and in Germany the SPD press, disappeared almost com-
pletely – and not merely because they had failed to modernise. These left-wing