Distorted perception due to the "hostile media phenomenon"?

Robert K. Merton's famous dictum about the "unanticipated consequences of action" in society applies to this case: overnight, the German communications researcher Otfried Jarren, who has been a member of the management team at the University of Zurich for years, has become interim rector of Switzerland's largest university. The media researcher has not only his predecessor Andreas Fischer to "thank" for his new position, who threw in the towel prematurely and in anger, but also a media scandal, at the center of which, bizarrely, are Christoph Mörgeli and his colleague Iris Ritzmann. This is remarkable in that the SVP has achieved exactly the opposite of what it wanted to achieve at the university. "The left-wing seed has sprouted," commented Mörgeli in the Tages-Anzeiger newspaper. This is gross nonsense, because Jarren can only be so easily pigeonholed if you yourself, like Mörgeli, are positioned on the far right. Jarren may have spent his time as an assistant at the FU Berlin in the wild 1980s, but he doesn't even have a comparable "left-wing" past to that of Res Strehle, editor-in-chief of the Tagi, who was scandalized by Weltwoche for this reason.

After the SVP, with its provincial barrage against the alleged superiority of German academics at Swiss universities, initially seemed to have had the effect that they were looking for a "Swiss citizen" (and not a native German with a Swiss passport) as Fischer's regular successor, Jarren now unexpectedly had to step into the breach two days before his 60th birthday and temporarily take up the post of the university's top crisis and communications manager. It gets even more bizarre. One day after the change of leadership, everyone who is anyone in German-speaking communication studies came together in Zurich to celebrate Jarren's 60th birthday - with a symposium on "Social Order through the Media" of all things. Media researchers flocked to the front stage to exchange highly abstract and scientific-theoretical views with Jarren on the extent to which communication creates social systems and structures (i.e. ultimately "order") - and how these can be changed and sometimes undermined by communication.

Media create their own reality

On the backstage, the media had just simultaneously and very specifically created social disorder and put the hierarchs of the otherwise rather sedate and also very self-confident university on high alert. Jarren did his best to minimize the damage to the university's reputation as the top crisis manager. He passed his acid test with aplomb and composure, was omnipresent during the conference and the subsequent celebration and - a master of multitasking - simultaneously engaged in dialog with the media and anyone else who wanted to get hold of the new rector. I have never experienced an academic conference at which the presentations were so coincidentally directly related to current events. The media not only depict reality, they also create their own reality and thus new social realities. Hans Matthias Kepplinger, for example, clearly showed in his lecture how the media create social disorder through scandalization, how unpredictable media reporting has become - and that media effects arise not least because actors deal with media reporting or take the expected media response into account in their actions. Viewed from the outside, one may come to the conclusion that the dismissal of Ms. Ritzmann was disproportionate, especially since it has been a principle covered by the "freedom of research and teaching" that researchers at universities can and should talk to journalists without having to obtain permission from the university management every time. However, anyone who has followed the media coverage of this university scandal closely must have gotten the impression that some media outlets were pursuing their own agenda. They did not simply report "what is" as neutrally as possible. However, it is also interesting to note that journalists like to see themselves in the role of "neutral observer", while those affected by the reporting usually perceive it differently. If, as in the case of Mörgeli/Ritzmann, there are even two camps affected by media coverage, it is relatively likely that both sides will perceive the media coverage as rather hostile - an effect that has long been described in research as the "hostile media phenomenon".