The Media during the Cold War | 165in the rest of Western Europe began promoting commercial channels in the
late 1950s. However, in the German Federal Republic not even Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer as head of an absolute majority government succeeded in
establishing a commercial channel. Many people and groups, including the
churches, feared a decline of culture and morals. Also the Federal Constitu-
tional Court judged that diversity of opinion could not be guaranteed because
there were too few transmitting frequencies (Steinmetz 1996). Since viewers
demanded alternatives, most Western countries introduced at least a second
channel as well as regional channels, and the ensuing element of competition
stimulated changes of content.
That it was precisely the 1980s that witnessed the almost simultaneous
advent of commercial channels in West Germany and Western Europe has
manifold causes. Cable and satellite technology made many new channels
possible. In addition to that there was new legislation. In 1981 and 1986
respectively, the Federal Constitutional Court legalised commercial channels,
declaring them in conformity with German Basic Law like the state-owned
channels (Humphreys 1994: 237), and in Italy the Constitutional Court had
already restricted the state’s monopoly on nationwide broadcasting in 1976.
Equally important was the change in political culture. On the one hand grass-
roots social movements on the political Left demanded programming variety
that was viewer oriented. On the other hand the ‘Conservative reversal’ had
gone hand in hand with calls for privatisation since 1980. In the Federal
Republic this tied in with the accusation levelled by the Christian Democrats
that many state-owned channels were nothing but a left-leaning ‘Red Broad-
casting’ (Rotfunk) and that therefore it was necessary to have private television
as a non-political corrective. The Social Democrats, the Greens, the churches
and the trade unions were initially opposed to private channels, as they feared
commercialisation, loss of quality and societal division (Humphreys 1994:
204; Bösch 2012).
The expansion of the channels proceeded in quite varied ways. In many
countries numerous viewer-oriented channels emerged. Up to the 1980s
about 2,500 local channels sprang up in Italy, some supported by political
groups. Scandinavia and the Federal Republic saw the emergence of local
channels like ‘Munich TV’ and ‘Tele Regional Passau’ (Hickethier 1998:
425). At the same time major private broadcasters appeared, and these
either took over local channels, giving them niches for regional interest pro-
grammes, as was the case in Germany, or, as in Italy under Berlusconi, linked
them all for nationwide broadcasting. In 1987 the largest commercial broad-
caster in France actually resulted from the privatisation of the previously
most important public channel, TF1. Commercial channels were frequently
established in cooperation with several newspaper publishers. For example,
the private channel SAT1, launched in 1984, was funded with capital from