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The final years of the Weimar Republic were dominated by two factors: the economic crisis with its surge in mass unemployment; and the development of the Nazi party into a mass movement. How did politicians respond to the challenges of a media democracy? This chapter studies the intensive news coverage of political violence, and examines the increasingly authoritarian nature of government press management. But even at this point, the Nazi press was unsuccessful in attracting a wider readership. So why did voters choose to support the Nazis? This book demonstrates that the economic crisis as such was insufficient in mobilizing voters to vote for the NSDAP. Rather, press presentation of increasing Communist violence and the perceived threat of civil war, together with the media image of an indecisive government, turned the Nazis into an attractive choice for voters desperate for decisive action.

This chapter explores the adoption of a system of press management by the Brandenburg–Manteuffel and Manteuffel Ministries of State in the 1850s. Press management included the institutionalization of a press office, which was responsible for the production of daily reports on the state of the news. It also included the production of official newspapers, circulation of government friendly articles, and granting of subventions to non-oppositional papers. Yet it soon became clear that the office could not shape public debate, as had been hoped. The disappointing results of official press measures in Prussia and other German states meant that governments had increasingly to show themselves willing to open up the workings of the state to greater scrutiny through a circulation of state materials. This would shift the relationship between the state and public sphere, especially after the unification of the German states.

This chapter looks at how two newspapers used unnamed sources in reports leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. When Iraq's weapons of mass destruction failed to materialize, critics on the left and from within journalism chastised the New York Times and Washington Post for overly credulous, unnamed source-laden investigative reporting appearing on their front pages in the buildup to the war. The newspapers responded by revisiting their unnamed sourcing practices, but not until more than a year after the invasion. These self-assessments generated attention around two problems negatively impacting prewar coverage: the calculated press management strategies of the Bush administration, and the willingness of the competing newspapers to reproduce official statements anonymously. The complex problems marking the journalist-unnamed source exchange come to light through these efforts to attach blame both to the sources and the journalists.