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Madrid, March 24th, 2010. 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall only 20% of East Germans declare themselves to be convinced by the concept of democracy. In Western Germany the support for democracy also dropped from 80% to 60%. At the same time voter turnout in the 2009 European Elections dropped again – and so did the share of Germans going to the ballot box in last year´s Federal Elections. Long-term data from the continuous media content analysis of the Zurich-based research institute Media Tenor, that are presented at the international scientific conference “Transnational Connections” in Spain, show that the patterns of news selection on political and social developments, help to explain this erosion of support for democracy.
The day-to-day analysis of main evening news and current-affairs programs in the US, the UK, Switzerland and Germany reveals that the same principles shape the news selection in political coverage everywhere:
1) The alternatives to the incumbents are not visible.
2) Controversial issues like the economic crisis or the referendum on minarets in Switzerland are presented always in the same way, focusing on the same aspects and the same protagonists. And regularly those protagonists that contribute most to developments in the real world, like for instance small and medium-sized enterprises in the case of business coverage or Imams with regard to the Minaret referendum, do not get adequate editorial space.
3) Especially parliaments are on present on TV screens, when government representatives appear before the parliamentarians. But this exactly conceals the function of the legislature.
4) Contrary to business coverage, where no journalist would entertain the idea of asking the competitors to comment on new products of a company - political coverage follows exactly this pattern. When party A presents a new political proposition, the opposing B, C and D parties are quoted extensively with their negative comments. This systematic negativism inevitably leads to the people turning away from the democratic system.
The update of the data that Media Tenor presented during the 2004 US election campaign at Yale University under the heading “Will Democracy Survive the Media”, shows no improvement in the diversity of issues or protagonists that are presented in political coverage. “Democracy depends on change”, Roland Schatz, Editor-in-Chief of Media Tenor declared in Madrid. “When the alternatives are not even presented as an option for reflection, then people turn away. This is not only true for TV programs, but for the basic concept of democracy – as is evident from the latest data on voter turnout.”

Media Tenor International has been analyzing opinion-leading media in German since 1994. For this analysis more than 500,000 news stories in US, UK, Swiss and German TV news programs have been analyzed.

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