Devil's stuff and savior

Every artist and art lover knows that the frame determines which picture or which section of a picture we see and how we perceive a picture. "Framing" has therefore also become a buzzword, even a paradigm, in communication research. It should help us to better understand why certain topics reach an initial attention threshold and are suddenly perceived publicly, but also how the discussion then develops further.

Let's resist the temptation to work our way through the current topic of horsemeat when looking at framing and instead take a look at how journalism has "framed" advertising over the last 50 years. For decades, the matter seemed clear: ever since Vance Packard published his bestseller "The Secret Seducers" in the 1950s, the advertising guild had been one of the forces of evil and had set out to manipulate people like puppets. Journalists, on the other hand, were the do-gooders and enlighteners of the world, and among us '68ers there were endless discussions about whether honest, credible journalism was only possible in media without advertising. At least the left-wing alternative Taz in Germany made a virtue of its necessity: because most advertisers were out of reach for it anyway, it boasted of being a (largely) advertising-free medium. At the same time, however, it was very successful in attracting paying readers.

Meanwhile, most mainstream journalists had completely lost sight of where the money came from that enabled media such as Der Spiegel or the New York Times to use investigative research to rap the knuckles of the world's powerful - from Franz-Josef Strauss and Richard Nixon to George Bush and Wen Jiabao - and make their faces sweat with fear. In the good times, American subscription newspapers generated up to 85 percent of their revenues from advertising; in Germany and Switzerland, this figure was probably closer to two thirds of their income. In any case, it was enough to not only make many publishers filthy rich, but also to provide editorial teams with lavish fat rings.

The fact that there would be no research-based quality journalism without the devil's own advertising only came into focus when this financing model began to crumble in the face of the internet revolution. And even today, many journalists and media researchers, who unanimously and thoughtlessly lament the progressive "commercialization" of the media business, hardly give an account of why the industry and thus the editorial offices have been doing so well for decades: The business model was so profitable because it consisted of many larger and smaller monopolies and oligopolies tacitly tolerated by the antitrust authorities and media policy. These really fleeced the advertising industry - state-monopoly capitalism sent its regards and showed its grimace, but everyone who otherwise liked to stylize themselves as reliable agents of enlightenment or the market economy apparently closed their eyes to it.

The Internet has turned this situation on its head. There, at least the "old" media are exposed to fierce competition. The news websites and journalistic offerings of the competition are just a mouse click away. Meanwhile, the octopuses Facebook and Google are generating monopoly returns from the new advertising business, which finally enables advertisers to reach their target groups without wastage. And while advertisers are gradually saying goodbye to traditional advertising - first the classifieds customers, then the discounters and branded companies - journalists, media researchers and other incorrigible optimists are wishing for advertising to return as the savior that will finance journalistic content. Or they hope for more state money and foundations to finance quality journalism.

Only two suggestions are apparently taboo and do not fit into the current journalistic framing of the newspaper and media crisis: if each of us gave up our daily cappuccino in the coffee shop to help finance our favorite online news site instead, journalism would be saved. And if less soap operas, fewer sports rights, less entertainment fluff and more foreign correspondents and journalistic research projects were financed from the available concession money, this could also serve the common good - and journalism that would finally be truly independent of advertising.