166 | Mass Media and Historical Change
165 newspapers and with shares of the FAZ and WAZ groups. The same was
true of RTL. The big newspapers hoped to market their views across media
boundaries in this way.
The establishment of commercial television is still too recent to permit an
academically objective assessment of its social consequences. Facile discourses
about the triviality and dearth of political content fostered by the commer-
cial broadcasters is just as current today as is the complaint that commercial
stations have aggravated the splitting of society into separate educational and
cultural classes. It may be assumed that commercial broadcasting in Europe
accelerated de-politicisation and social differentiation, and especially changed
role models for young people. In countries such as Italy where the state-owned
channels are financed by advertising to a great degree, they have copied their
private competitors much more closely. Future studies will be able to examine
long-term societal consequences of this development in many areas: for
example, the effects of consumer culture on sports, the relationship between
the sexes, and anxiety about crime levels. On the whole, the fear that the dual
broadcasting system with its countless channels would lead to a fragmentation
of society has not been substantiated. On the contrary, it is evident that only a
few major commercial broadcasters have been successful in each country, since
viewers tend to watch only a few channels on a regular basis.
With the establishment of the Internet, television has itself now become
an ‘old’ medium and will therefore have increased relevance for historical
analyses. At the same time the significance of television as a historical storage
medium is growing, the more so as it increasingly chronicles history using its
own sources. Seen in this light, television contributes to the constitution of
events which it later presents in a historical context by using the same material
as before, and it thus decisively shapes the culture of remembrance (Bösch and
Schmidt 2010). The examination as well as the deconstruction of these media
loops will be the responsibility of future chroniclers of contemporary history.