Media thrust in the German Bundestag election, 1994: News values and professional norms in political communication

This article analyzes how the news media shape the political process, particularly in times of elections. The so-called ''Super-Wahljahr'' in Germany, with a total of 20 elections on all legislative levels culminating in the campaign for the federal parliament in October 1994, is taken as a case in point. The data are supplied by the project ''Medien Tenor,'' a continuous quantitative content analysis of some 75 German print and television news media of national significance. The findings can be summarized as follows: (1) Most of the German news media covered the campaign in a way that indicates an advocacy model, that is, endorsing one of the candidates more or less strongly; (2) Similar to findings in the United States, news about the candidates was rather bad news and focused on personal images rather than issue positions; (3) Particularly for the printed press, I found a strong correlation between a news medium's standpoint on candidates and parties as expressed in the editorials and its selection of statements in the news (''synchronization'').