154 | Mass Media and Historical Change
This critical turnabout in media culture also tends to put the innovative
force of the ’68 Movement into perspective. It was not the student protests
that first created a critical public that grappled with deficits of democracy,
problems of social injustice, or the Nazi past. It was the fact that the ’68
generation had been socialised during the aforementioned period of media
change and had then seized upon and exaggerated the criticism voiced by the
media and taken it to extremes. Many of these ’68ers aimed their protests at
all established media, accusing not only the ‘Springer Press’ of falsifying public
opinion. They put their trust in homemade flyers, posters and public presence
instead. Nevertheless the ’68ers frequently cooperated with the modern mass
media and made use of their logic. Protests and happenings were staged for
cameras, and journalists were freely admitted to events and communes, which
helped to form their public image as well as their self-image. It was the media
that gave these students – who were a relatively small group in society – their
great significance and also shaped it: the mass media linked individual actions,
turning them into a movement; they then personalised them and fostered the
international exchange of protest forms (Kraushaar 2001; Vogel 2010). Also
the American Civil Rights Movement benefited from its presence on televi-
sion, a medium that, especially in the Southern States, broke through the con-
servative and racist attitudes of the local press and broadcasters (Hilmes 2004:
210f.). The same is true of the New Social Movements of the 1970s, whose
local origins were given universal meaning by the media. But the terrorists
of the 1970s also interacted with them: they made expert use of innovations
(like videos and Polaroid pictures) and sent their blackmailing messages via
the international press so as to put pressure on political leaders and influ-
ence policy. It was only because of the German media that individual terrorist
groups like the Red Army Faction came to prominence. By the same token
expressions like ‘sympathiser’ were coined in the media (Elter 2008).
The ’68ers and the new social movements tried to establish their own alter-
native media in the 1970s. What was aimed for was a ‘new type of press’:
papers were to be democratically produced by editorial collectives, with inte-
grated readers’ comments; circulation was to be kept small and have a local ori-
entation; they were to be independent of advertising; and finally they were to
use their critical style to stir up the readers. Even an alternative newpaper, the
tageszeitung (called taz), was founded in 1979, which followed these principles
and was closely linked with the new Green party (Rösch-Sondermann 1988;
Büteführ 1995: 471f.; Holtz-Bacha, in Wilke 1999: 331). A few alternative
local pirate radio stations emerged in Germany too, and a few of them, like
Radio Dreyeckland, still exist today. Furthermore, international news services
came into being as supra-regional links in several countries. Among these the
first was the U.S. ‘Liberation News Service’ (beginning in 1967), the ‘Agence
de la Presse Libération’ in France, the English ‘People’s News Service’, and