The Media during the Cold War | 161Nor did television replace newspapers and magazines as many people
expected. On the contrary, official commissions in West Germany found that
during the 1960s income from advertising and circulation rose, even though
the fact that publishing was concentrated in a few big companies had caused
the demise of some traditional newspapers. In Great Britain this was mainly
true for Sunday papers and the provincial press, with the latter additionally
suffering from competition from giveaway papers (Williams 2010: 204). Since
European newspapers were considered an endangered medium worthy of pro-
tection they received state support: in France, Austria, Italy and Scandinavia
it was via direct subsidies for some segments of the press, and in other nations
like Great Britain and Germany by means of tax breaks (Puppis 2007: 183f.).
Television very likely contributed to an increase in the visual content of news-
papers and magazines, whose pictorial matter was sometimes as much as 50
per cent (Straßner 2002: 29). It would also be well to examine more closely the
extent to which television ‘profoundly’ changed press photography (Dewitz
and Lebeck 2001: 250, 274). Press photos very probably stood on their own
as unique critical and artistic commentaries because they no longer simply and
primarily depicted events.
Especially hard hit by television was the cinema. Because the numbers of
moviegoers had fallen drastically since the 1950s, Hollywood reacted with
new recording and playback techniques, epic blockbusters (like The Ten Com-
mandments), and specifically targeted young people as a group, since the older
generation were more likely to be television viewers. However, television
and cinema were not always competitors; in Hollywood, corporations had
already had a hand in television productions during the 1950s. Yet coopera-
tion between film and television productions continued to be problematic in
Europe because the broadcasting companies produced more made-for-tele-
vision films of their own (Hilmes, in Nowell-Smith 1996: 468). Neverthe-
less, in West Germany, too, ambitious films were often made possible only by
joint financing. As was the case with radio, cinemas had to diversify during
the 1980s and this was accomplished by building multiplexes incorporating
several smaller cinemas that showed different films for different target groups.
Although television content was fairly apolitical on the whole, the medium
was nevertheless strictly regulated and controlled by politics. In most countries
the form of this control was similar to that of radio. In the United States and
Latin America, television was commercially organised from its inception and
essentially maintained by the big radio stations. Only later did authoritar-
ian regimes and dictatorships in various South American countries limit its
variety and tighten state control. Yet other than in Communist dictatorships,
private stations continued to exist in several countries (as in Mexico), or state
ownership was limited (as in Peru). In the West European democracies on the
other hand, the British principle of state-owned television prevailed. Public