World Bulletin
German Mass Media Pay Attention to the UNBy Helmut Volger
German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the UN. UN Photo/Marco Castro.
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Feb. 17, Falkensee, Germany -- Reports on the United Nations in German media – television, radio, newspapers – are often colored by their own political attitudes and reflect the opinions of politicians through their speeches and lawmaking. Whether the mass media are able to influence public attitudes, however, or merely reflect changes in political attitudes of the public remains an issue of contention among political scientists. Whatever the politics, German coverage of the UN is broader and more positive compared with much of American media.
In contrast to public opinion in the United States, which has shown tremendous fluctuation in its evaluation of whether the UN “does a good job” – from a high rating of 55 percent in 1953 to low figures of 28 percent in 1985, and more recently, 26 percent in 2009, according to Gallup --– the polls in Germany show that up to 80 percent of its citizens polled have given the UN high ratings since the late 1980s.
In 1989, 47 percent of German respondents said that the UN was doing a good job. In a 2005 poll, more than 80 percent gave a favorable evaluation. Ten percent of the respondents said their opinion of the UN was “very favorable,” and 71 percent said “mostly favorable.”
This sympathy for the UN might be related to Germany’s “newcomer” status among UN nations. It joined only in 1973 as a full member (at that time still divided into two states, the Federal Republic in the west and the German Democratic Republic in the east) and did not pursue an active UN policy until 1990, when the two states united.
One outcome of greater German involvement in the UN has been intense political debates at home, particularly about contributing troop contingents to UN peacekeeping missions and a campaign, unsuccessful, to have a permanent seat in the Security Council in UN reform debates in 1997 and in 2004-2005.
An active UN policy has been accompanied in the German political landscape and mass media by much (often euphoric) optimism and (too) high expectations regarding the future role of Germany in the UN, with politicians justifying their high expectations by citing Germany’s role as the third-largest payer of UN assessments. The disappointment about the result of the 2005 World Summit – no permanent council seat for Germany – was therefore enormous.
Nevertheless, the German public’s high approval values did not decline.
Consistent Coverage on TV
The funny thing is that German sympathy for the UN - as is the case for many other UN member states – is not based on detailed knowledge of the world body. A worldwide public opinion survey done in 1989 by the UN Department of Public Information found that only 30 percent of Germans who were asked could name a specialized agency of the UN, and that 48 percent could pick the current UN secretary-general’s name from a list of all secretaries-general.
One reason, perhaps, for the continuously high approval ratings lies in the attitude of the mass media in Germany: coverage of the UN is regularly present – if on a small scale – with the approach rather fair-minded. The main source of information in Germany for 80 percent of the public is television, and channels report regularly on UN events.
While commercial TV channels spend little time on this topic in their news programs, reproducing news-agency reports, the public-television channels ARD and ZDF spend double their time on the UN, often complementing news items with reports from their own UN correspondents and occasionally with analyses from political magazines. The relatively high quality of their UN news is of great importance for German public opinion, since about 40 percent of news viewers watch public TV, and only about 10 percent see the news programs of commercial TV. Thus the average viewer gets a rather positive impression of the UN, even though domestic problems and European Union news are more prominent.
Reporting in Newspapers
The same high level of coverage is found in the small number of quality newspapers in Germany, like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Süddeutsche Zeitung, periodicals mainly read by people with advanced education. Regional and local newspapers have coverage comparable with that of commercial TV, publishing only short reports from news agencies.
Another group of newspapers, the lower-quality tabloids, have a combined daily circulation of more than 4 million copies. They seldom publish articles on the UN, but fortunately for the German government these politically influential, mood-making mass newspapers have publishers who are – in contrast to some anti-UN media czars in the US – more or less internationally minded and UN-supportive in their attitudes.
Book publishing, having ignored the UN until the mid-1990s, has recently discovered the topic is interesting for readers with academic backgrounds, with the industry producing books comparable to David Malone’s “The UN Security Council: From the Cold War to the 21st Century.” What Germany lacks are introductory books for the broader public, like Linda Fasulo’s “An Insider’s Guide to the UN.”
For the most part, Germans appreciate the UN, even idealizing it to some extent and often expecting too much of it -- in peacekeeping, for example -- and then find themselves somewhat disappointed with the results.
Helmut Volger is the author or editor of 10 books about the UN, including “A Concise Encyclopedia of the United Nations” (now in 2nd edition in English, Leiden/Boston 2010). He is also a founder of the German UN Research Network at Potsdam University, linking scholars, politicians, diplomats and journalists.
Keywords:
German mass media, UN, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, ARD, ZDF
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