Wolfgang Kraushaar

1968 and Mass Media

In the context of the »68« movement, the mass media was much more than simply a reporting body: It was also opponent, supporter and aggrandiser, indeed it even moulded events, and this in a very specific manner. In view of its role, one must speak of an event-forming factor. Hardly any of the aims of the SDS and the APO had an as polarising effect, and on the other hand found such an echo, as their anti-Springer campaign. It was here that the role of the mass media in its problematic form – that is its nearly monopolistic extension of power to the point of becoming a factor which could no longer be democratically controlled – was directly linked to one of the central political aims of the »68« movement, namely that of expropriating or at least break up a press company in order to banish the threat this held for parliamentary democracy. In all probability, however, the impetus for this campaign came not from the SDS, but from the SED. In the state party of the GDR, attacks on the Bild newspaper and other Springer publications had much longer antecedents, extending back to the building of the Berlin Wall. The high point of the »68« movement was doubtless the murder of Dutschke and the attempt which followed to prevent distribution of Springer newspapers. Such a reaction to the murder was to be expected, given their unremitting slandering of student protesters, but can be directly tied neither to the killer himself nor to his motives. Whether or not the radically conservative Josef Bachmann was a reader or was even manipulated by the Springer press cannot be demonstrated. Evidence presented during his trial in 1969 suggests rather that he was influenced by the Deutsche Nationalzeitung, making him instead a propaganda object of the paper put out by the radical conservative Munich publisher, Gerhard Frey.