MASS MEDIA IN DIVIDED GERMANY 569
state and the party initially tried to crack down on this practice and to
remove receivers that had been set up without permission, the Politburo
caved in during the summer of 1988 and liberalized the process for get-
ting a license for satellite receivers. It feared the potential for major con-
fl ict in light of the increased number of prominent cases. From this point
on, there were no longer any legal provisions that stood in the way of
East Germans watching television from the FRG, not even in the areas
in which terrestrial signals could not be picked up.^67 The failure of the
GDR’s eff orts to achieve demarcation in terms of the media certainly had
to do with detente politics, but it was also very much the result of media
innovations, as well as technical and, not least, social dynamics.
The rise of television as the new main media form contributed signifi -
cantly to these processes. By the mid-1970s, almost every household in
West Germany owned a television set (95 percent); in East Germany, 80
percent of households had a television at this point as well.^68 As a result,
radio became more like background noise that ran throughout the day,
and movie theaters suff ered under a massive lack of visitors, especially
from among the older population groups.^69 For more and more Germans,
watching television became a permanent part of the evening ritual. Not
without reason, then, political interest in television increased in both Ger-
man states, but this manifested itself in very diff erent ways. In the GDR,
the political character of mass media was taken for granted, but as of the
1960s, the infl uence of the SED on television grew considerably.^70 This
could be seen, for example, in the creation of a central television super-
visory body (Staatliches Komitee für Fernsehen) in 1968, although this
kind of centralized, tight direction and control by the SED did not diff er
fundamentally from that of other media.^71
The public radio stations in West Germany had also functioned as a
stage for partisan political power plays after the Allies withdrew from the
country. The political intervention directed at television in West Germany
also increased in the 1960s, and it primarily targeted the new journalistic
formats that took a critical stance on politics, such as Panorama.^72 In the
1970s, this interference took on a new dimension as the public radio and
television stations were systematically drawn into the fi ght between the
political camps to control television reporting in the country. These bat-
tles were not limited to creating scandals over individual people or pro-
grams, but rather developed a structural character. In light of the wave
of RAF terrorism, the new Ostpolitik, and the economic crisis, political
polarization generally increased in West Germany after the grand coali-
tion dissolved in 1969. Moreover, a growing number of confl icts began to
erupt over personnel decisions in the supervisory boards of the diff erent
stations.^73 Political “equilibrium”^74 became the phrase of the day, and