Which shouldn't come as a surprise: British evening papers (tabloids) are mostly conservative, as is Bild-Zeitung in today's Germany. Yet, left-wing tabloids are not unheard of, in countries like Portugal or Chile.
Earlier
posts have dealt with the first Berlin tabloid, the emblematic BZ am
Mittag, and with its communist counterpart : Welt am Abend, in
the Willi Münzenberg publishing sphere, something as unique as a
communist paper which was not read exclusively by party-members, a
paper that did not content itself with political propaganda but which
also aimed at giving information and also at entertaining, something
considered « bourgeois » by traditionalist marxists.
That
kind of tabloids, also known as « Boulevard papers »,
encountered contemptuous disdain among the political class. In
particular Hugenberg (a business tycoon on the extreme-right,
who would eventually become, for some time, minister in Hitler’s
first government) struggled with fellow DNVP Protestant puritans
(DNVP was the German National Party, conservative, nationalist and
antisemitic) who considered his Nachtausgabe an immoral
enterprise aimed at titillating the masses. But Hugenberg was
unwilling to leave this field to Ullstein and Mosse (the other two
big publishing houses, more democratic, as opposed to Hugenberg’s,
openly hostile to the republican system).
Already
in 1919, the right-wing star columnist Adolf Stein had pointed out to
Hugenberg that ‘through our nationalist newspapers we do not reach
the masses who read social democratic or democratic papers’.
Nachtausgabe, founded in 1922, was Hugenberg’s attempt at wooing a
metropolitan, predominantly working-class readership. This was not
simply a commercial move, but one driven by political motives, as
Hugenberg defended himself in front of his nationalist colleagues. In
all big cities of the world, he explained, a tabloid relied on a
particular layout and composition: ‘Otherwise these big city folk
simply don’t buy it. They buy it because of the sensation which it
carries—and they swallow the politics which is contained in
between.’
Party
newspapers generally were on the decline, one journalist declared in
1928: The working population of Berlin is reading the lively and
well-edited papers whether they are produced by the publishing houses
Mosse, Ullstein, Hugenberg or Münzenberg; they don’t generally
bother about the party tendency . . . They want a quick and precise
news service, want pictures and demand a certain tickle. It does not
want to be lectured, but to be informed, and to be slightly
sensationalized. . . ’
The
tabloids we have seen this far belonged to the extreme-right, the
extreme-left and the center. But what about the socialdemocrats, one
of the biggest parties in the Republic ? Their party-organ was
called Vorwärts, a « serious » newspaper. Shortly before
the Reichstag elections in 1928, the SPD attempted to jump on the
tabloid-bandwagon and turned the evening edition of Vorwärts into a
tabloid-style paper, called Der Abend. It was a fiasco. What had
happened with the Weimar Republic if the SPD had had a mass-media
genius as Münzenberg in their service, as the Communists had ?
Could German democracy have survived ?
As
we have seen, Ullstein, one of the « democratic »
publishing houses (the other one being Mosse), had at an earlier
stage launched BZ am Mittag. But in 1929, they started a second
tabloid : Tempo. Why ? As a reply to Mosse’s acquisition
of the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, aimed to compete with the other two
late-afternoon tabloids, Münzenberg’s Welt am Abend and
Hugenberg’s Nachtausgabe. Remember : BZ am Mittag appeared at
1 p.m. Tempo was the most radical proponent of American-style
tabloid journalism, with an emphasis on the latest news, up to three
revised editions in one afternoon, and an abundance of sensations and
catastrophes outdoing everything Berlin had read so far. During the
first months of its existence, Tempo lacked almost any
political
coverage, and soon became the epitome of the Americanization of the
press, decried by conservatives as ‘asphalt flower’ and ‘Jewish
flurry’.
In
contrast to other Ullstein publications, Tempo was not an instant
success. Within some months, however, its circulation had surpassed
140,000. There is good reason to believe it was because of Tempo’s
role in the course of the so-called Sklarek scandal in
October-November 1929, an affair involving several high-ranking local
government officials, including Berlin’s SPD-mayor Gustav Böss.
Tempo established itself as one of the most vociferous prosecutors,
and attracted a lot of attention by its sensationalist exposure of
local corruption. Contrary to Ullstein’s long tradition of
supporting the democratic cause, the Tempo now joined Hugenberg’s
Nachtausgabe and Münzenberg’s communist Welt am Abend in attacking
Berlin’s political leadership. Although the emphasis lay on
sensationalist revelations and was not driven by an anti-democratic
world view, effectively Tempo contributed to the growing number
of voices denigrating the democratic system. Whether this was a
conscious business decision is difficult to establish. But it is a
fact that from 1925 anti-democratic tabloids were benefiting from
better growth rates than were those supporting the parliamentary
system. Unlike the political papers, where Ullstein’s Vossische
Zeitung was outperforming Hugenberg’s Tag, democratic tabloids like
Ullstein’s BZ am Mittag, Mosse’s 8-Uhr-Abendblatt, or the
12-Uhr-Blatt were struggling to keep up the circulation they had
reached in the early 1920s, and never came close to the growth
displayed by Hugenberg’s Nachtausgabe or Münzenberg’s Welt am
Abend after 1925.
Aa readers’ survey of 1924 shows that a paper was not just
bought for its political conviction, shared by the reader, but for
the entertainment it provided. Also, a lot of circulation growth was
clearly driven by non-political factors: part of the Nachtausgabe’s
increase in circulation was the result of well-advertised prize draws
in 1928 and 1929, the latter with a mass-participation of some
316,000 Berliners. But at the same time neither the 8-Uhr-Abendblatt
nor the BZ am Mittag managed to grow decisively, despite being
staffed with high- quality journalists and benefiting from the
resources of the Mosse and Ullstein publishing houses. They, too,
organized their own prize draws and provided a similar amount of
illustrations, caricatures, and entertainment, without the success of
their ‘anti-system’ opponents.
Among
which we shouldn't forget Der Angriff, Goebbels attempt at
conquering new supporters for the Nazis. Founded
in July 1927, the paper was not aimed at what Goebbels
described as the ‘educated public’: ‘Angriff was meant to be
read by the masses, and the masses usually only read that which they
understand’, as the coming Minister for Education put it.
There
were many similarities between Angriff and the rest of the Berlin
press. Angriff had to offer at least to some extent content which
Berlin newspaper readers had come to expect from their papers, like
theatre, film, radio and book reviews, a women’s and a youth’s
supplement, and the like. In its early years, Angriff could not
afford photo reproductions, and the bulk of its images was provided
by a caricaturist from Hugenberg’s tabloid, Nachtausgabe, Hans
Schweitzer. For almost
five years, Hans Schweitzer provided both tabloids with caricatures.
Under his Nazi nom-de-plume ‘Mjölnir’, Schweitzer was to become
the National Socialists’ most important caricaturist, illustrator,
and visual propagandist, hailed after 1933 as ‘the Third Reich’s
graphic artist’. Schweitzer’s Angriff ideal types of tall, blond,
male Aryans, aggressive and determined, with jutting jaw lines and
muscular bodies, were more openly propagandistic and his caricatures
generally more
anti-Semitic than most of the drawings he produced for Nachtausgabe;
still, the fact that Schweitzer published anti-republican caricatures
on a daily basis for Hugenberg’s tabloid demonstrates the degree of
politicization of the tabloid press in this period.
Information
from « Press and politics in the Weimar Republic », by
Bernhard Fulda, Oxford University Press, 2009.
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