By Jo Groebel

In Germany there are characteristics that are peculiar to the media. These include the emphasis on federal sovereignty in cultural affairs and broadcasting and the dual existence of public and private media, something that cannot be taken for granted in other countries but that is certainly usual in a European context. As regards freedom of the press and speech, in international terms Germany comes off very well. There is pluralism with regard to opinion and information. The press is not in the hands of the government or political parties, but rather in that of private media companies. As part of the democratization of Germany following World War II, the public network was modeled on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The stations take the form of corporations (or bodies under public law) financed by license fees. In the 1980s private TV stations were founded. 

In Germany the freedom of the press and speech is the common property of everyone and protected by the Constitution. Article 5 of the Basic Law expresses how the Constitution interprets the freedom of the press and communication: “Every person shall have the right freely to express and disseminate his opinions in speech, writing and pictures and to inform himself without hindrance from generally accessible sources. (...) There shall be no censorship.”

In general the structure of the German media can be explained by the specific conditions of recent German history. All these upheavals, at intervals of less than 30 years – democratization, the First World War, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and Second World War, the East-West conflict and the Cold War, the student revolts and reunification always had a media side to them, indeed would have been unimaginable without the mass media.