Edition 01/2018

By Mandy Tröger

By Martina Thiele | In an interview with Nina Horaczek, chief reporter at the Viennese weekly newspaper Falter, the University of Tübingen’s media scholar Martina Thiele discusses the role of media in the National Council election campaign and the possible consequences of the election result for press freedom in Austria. Independent journalism does not have it easy in a country that, as a small European state, struggles with the consequences of a highly concentrated media market. Quite a few people abroad think of political scandals when they hear Austria, involving media and politics – whether it be the Waldheim affair around war crimes during Nazi times or the recent Ibiza scandal surrounding corrupt party politics and biased reporting, leading to the collapse of the governing coalition and early elections in 2019.

By Tanjev Schultz | TV debates like the presidential debates in the United States are prominent events in election campaigns. Their rules and effects have been the subject of public and academic discussions for decades. Against this background, this article presents observations and lessons learned from the most recent TV debates in Germany and the United States. It suggests new formats and structures for such programs and uses examples to highlight the dangers that political populism and extremism pose to the seriousness and substance of TV debates.

By Jochen Zenthöfer | Shortly before an election, the editorial office receives some accusations of plagiarism. What should they do? Report on them or ignore them? This paper provides a structure that ensures that journalists do not become instruments of plagiarism hunters. After all, once reported on, some accusations take on a life of their own; while others later turn out to be false. Accusations of plagiarism have now become part of the political contest. The principles for reporting on accusations are also relevant. Just a few days before an election, absolutely nothing should be reported regarding accusations that cannot be investigated in such a short time. Yet media do not need to wait until a university has made its final decision, either.

By Sophie Wannenmacher | How easy is TV news to understand? This paper analyzes thirty news items broadcast between November 2022 and December 2022. The items and presenting analyzed come from the following news programs: The 8 p.m. edition of tagesschau on ARD, Sat.1 Abendnachrichten (renamed :newstime in June 2023 (cf. Weis 2023)), RTL Aktuell, logo! on the KiKa children’s channel and heute at 7 p.m. on ZDF. As well as investigating the programs using three models of comprehensibility, the speaking rate and other language parameters were also analyzed and compared with one another in detail. The analyses show logo! and heute to be the two easiest programs to understand, followed by Sat.1 Nachrichten and RTL Aktuell. tagesschau was the most difficult to understand on average within the period observed.

By Timo Rieg | The practical meaning of various quality criteria – specifically correct­ness, accuracy, formal completeness, relevance, diversity of opinion and perspectives, proportionality, and correction – is discussed based on examples of reporting from health and medical journalism. The benchmark for this discussion is the service of orientation that the reporting provides. The individual cases presented have deficits, most of which can be prevented through journalistic working routines, without appreciable additional cost or effort. This paper thus hopes to provide inspiration for media practitioners to reflect on their own work and that of others.

By Fritz Hausjell and Wolfgang R. Langenbucher | A project by the University of Vienna’s Department of Communication, the idea of selecting and presenting the best books by journalists was co-founded by Hannes Haas (1957-2014) and is compiled by Wolfgang R. Langenbucher and Fritz Hausjell. The first edition was published in 2002 in the quarterly journal Message, founded by Michael Haller. When that journal ceased publication, the book recommendations were documented in the magazine Der österreichische Journalist [The Austrian journalist] from 2015. This was interrupted in 2020 and 2021 due to the pandemic. In 2022, a new place of publication was found: Journalism Research.

Reviewed by Gunter Reus

Reviewed by Rudolf Thomas Inderst

Reviewed by Thomas Liesen