The Media during the Cold War | 155from 1973 the German ‘Informationsdienst zur Verbreitung unterbliebener
Nachrichten’ (Information Service for the Dissemination of Missing News)
(Stamm 1988: 72). The track record was sobering. The urban magazines in
big cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin survived to today but have been
commercialised since the 1980s. The news services collapsed, with the few
supra-regional papers like Libération in France and taz in Germany able to
survive only in a financially ailing state and by changing their principles. By
this token the taz abolished the rotation system among its journalists, intro-
duced a small sports section and moved readers’ letters to the back (Flieger
1992: 194). The influence of these papers on the media public remained small,
but at least they contributed to a stabilisation of an alternative milieu from
which the Green Party was able to profit. However the press of the 1970s and
1980s was characterised less by a swing to the Left than by political polarisa-
tion. Its positions were now more belligerent, whether they were Right or Left.
A Global Television Age?
In all industrialised countries, television is the activity that defines leisure most
strongly. U.S. citizens already spent four to five hours in front of the television
as far back as 1957, with Germans and Britons spending two hours watching
television during the 1960s (Stumberger 2002: 118, 174). Thus for over five
decades television has played a crucial role in most people’s lives in these coun-
tries. Nevertheless historians have so far paid little attention to this medium.
Media and communication scholars have conducted numerous studies on the
history of television that address its technical development, organisation, and
programming history (cf. e.g. for the FRG: Kreuzer and Thomsen 1994; and
Hickethier 1998; for the GDR: Steinmetz and Viehoff 2008). On the other
hand not much research has been done on the social, political and cultural
significance of German television in the postwar decades. The fact that in
the 1960s, when television became established as a mass medium in Western
Europe, values and lifestyles underwent a fundamental change is certainly no
coincidence, although processes of change in other areas like consumerism and
social behaviour were likewise connected contributing factors. The influence
of television on family, on gender roles, politics, sports, culture, education and
religious, social and national identities has hardly ever been studied.
Early television was often described as a cannibalistic medium because it
adopted several elements from older media. In this remediation, television
picked up image, sound and aesthetics from the cinema, news from the news-
reels, performances from the theatre and organisation, programming and
reception forms from the radio. Whereas in the case of other new media, design
and use had initially been quite free, wireless picture transmission immediately