The Media during the Cold War | 153States, authors like Tom Wolfe demanded a ‘new journalism’ that concerned
itself more with subjective reporting about subcultures and social problems.
In the case of the German Federal Republic, one could discern a change from
‘consensus journalism’ towards critical journalism, a phenomenon that Chris-
tina von Hodenberg attributes to generational change: journalists born around
1930 and strongly influenced by the establishment of democracy were now
joining editorial teams of both newspapers and radio (von Hodenberg 2006).
By the same token politicians changed the way they dealt with the media,
attempting to involve them in a more cooperative way, as did Willy Brandt
and John F. Kennedy (Münkel 2005).
Since the 1960s, the number of scandals in Western countries, brought
up by investigative journalists, has increased. These media scandals challenge
politicians and often force them to step down. The Spiegel Affair in 1962 had
a similar impact on the political and journalistic culture in Europe to ‘Water-
gate’ in the United States. This liberalisation of journalistic work was pro-
moted by the highest courts. In the United States the Supreme Court proved
itself to be a decisive defender of press freedom in 1964 with ‘New York Times
vs. Sullivan’, in which it found that erroneous statements about public figures
were actionable only in the case of intentional falsehood and actual malice.
This meant that the media no longer had to fear financial ruin from libel
suits because of journalistic mistakes (Lewis 2008: 51). In West Germany
the Federal Constitutional Court several times defended freedom of the press
from state intervention, and the Spiegel Affair was followed by several other
laws in the Federal States that protected the work of journalists.
Around 1960, photojournalism also began a transformation. Inspired
by the images in Life magazine and by human-interest photography, pic-
tures increasingly showed the fates of little-known individuals, with critical
intent. The big weekly magazines often used contrastive arrangements of
photographs to give greater emphasis to their critical accompanying texts.
Instead of pictures of statesmen or the Pope, newspapers readers and tele-
vision viewers were now often confronted with images of superannuated
party members or empty churches (Städter, in Bösch and Hölscher 2010:
104f.). In this respect the change in aesthetics may very well have influenced
the change in social attitudes. At the end of the 1960s, the Vietnam War in
particular demonstrated the power of such images: photos of the massacre
at My Lai or the naked girl Kim Phuc fleeing from the bombs became icons
and turned the war into a moral defeat for the United States. So far little
research has been done about how editorial staff selected and edited the
pictures or how photo agencies marketed them (Zierenberg 2013). Hardly
anything is as yet known about their appropriation or the degree to which
these ‘global icons’ had any meaning in Eastern or Southern Europe, or even
in Africa.