Sponsorship award for "media normal"

Michel Pramor, Niklas Steffen, Paulina Emma Möller, Paula Böhnke, Titus Herrmann and Helene Brühl have created a quantitative content analysis of reporting in a regional and supra-regional comparison. They were supervised by Assistant Professor Fabian Prochazka and the project partner was the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society.

Since 2013, the German party spectrum has been transformed by the then newly founded and initially merely Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Over the past ten years, the AfD has received increasing support from the population, which is reflected in its election results. At the same time, the party has become more radicalised. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution now classifies the party as a whole as a suspected right-wing extremist organisation and the Thuringia state association has been classified as proven right-wing extremist since 2021. As the media plays a major role in influencing opinions and political orientation, the students analysed how the AfD is covered in their study. They examined whether a possible normalisation of the party takes place in the reporting by giving its viewpoints space and not sufficiently classifying its positions.

In order to answer the research question "Is the AfD being normalised in media coverage over the period 2013 to 2023?", the project team first developed a concept of media normalisation and then conducted a quantitative content analysis. A total of 661 online articles from the "Thüringer Allgemeine" newspaper and 908 online articles from the "Süddeutsche" newspaper were analysed during the study period. A regional and a national newspaper were compared, as the AfD in Thuringia enjoys greater support among the population and has been characterised by Björn Höcke's radical course for several years. The students surmised that this could lead to differences in reporting. The handling of reporting on the AfD was analysed in the dimensions of "attention", "adaptation" and "acceptance", examined with regard to media normalisation and compared between the two media.

The results show that the AfD has gained more attention over time and that the frequency of articles has increased in both media. It is striking that the AfD has been increasingly portrayed as politically effective since 2015. In 2023, this was the case in every second article in the "Süddeutsche" newspaper and the "Thüringer Allgemeine". During the same period, however, the party was increasingly treated less critically in both national and regional reporting than in its initial phase. This trend did not stop until 2023. The project team also found that more than half of all articles in both media analysed did not place the AfD on the democratic spectrum. Even though the party has been categorised more frequently again since 2023, the majority of articles in regional reporting on the secured far-right Thuringia state association do not include a general categorisation.

However, the four other projects also investigated exciting topics, namely:

• Tatort: Between affirmation and criticism – The portrayal of the police in public entertainment production using the example of "Tatort"
• Artificial Relationships: Replicating Relationships – A heuristic model for the development of relationships between humans and humanised AI companions
• Simply Inclusive: To what extent do audiovisual journalistic news offerings in plain language have added value for people with and without learning disabilities?
• Who is #thatgirl?: An explorative study of the influence of the TikTok trend on the identity formation of young women

All project descriptions can be found in the Project Forum 2024 brochure (in German only).

Congratulations to all project teams and especially to the winners of the 2024 award!