News from Germany 1900-1945 and implications for today

This discusses a 2025-07-03 interview with University of British Columbia History professor Heidi J.S. Tworek about her research on the impact of the media on politics in Germany focusing especially in 1900 through 1945 and its implications for today. A video and 29:00 mm:ss podcast excerpted from the interview will be added when available. The podcast will be released 2025-06-14 to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations.

It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources and treating others with respect.

2025-07-03 interview with University of British Columbia history professor Heidi J.S. Tworek about the impact of the media on politics in Germany focusing especially in 1900 through 1945 and its implications for today.

29:00 mm:ss excerpts from a 2025-07-03 interview with University of British Columbia history professor Heidi J.S. Tworek about the impact of the media on politics in Germany focusing especially in 1900 through 1945 and its implications for today.

University of British Columbia history professor Heidi J.S. Tworek discusses her research on the impact of the media on politics in Germany focusing especially in 1900 through 1945 and its implications for today as documented in her prize-winning (2019) book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945, and other works. She is interviewed by Spencer Graves.

Highlights

Accountability journalism

Professor Tworek was asked about Usher and Kim-Leffingwell (2022), who created a dataset of all the federal prosecutions for political corruption in each of the 94 US federal court districts between 2003 and 2019 along with the number of journalists and members of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). They found more prosecutions with members of INN but not with more journalists. Tworek replied that this shows us that the type of journalism matters "for holding people accountable, presumably preventing crimes".

Graves noted that,

“ Watchdogs protect the people who feed them.

You benefit from the presence of accountability journalism, even if you don't read it yourself

”

Society needs accountability journalism. But who will fund that? Tworek discussed that in her (2019) News from Germany. Tworek noted, "the types of content that we see really depend upon who owns these businesses and what their motivations are. ... "There's, I think, something important about having local outlets where people know who journalists are and what they do, and then that's also extremely important, because a lot of the skepticism of journalism in part, may stem from not really knowing what journalism is and how journalism is produced. And there's been some really interesting work on media literacy that's trying to tease this out ... . [I]f you just teach people to kind of critique stuff, they end up very skeptical of all media, whereas, if instead you say, All right, we're going to go into a school instead of just teaching you to critique the whole thing, we're actually just going to give you the assignment of writing some news. And then you see as a student, like, 'Oh, this is really hard. I have to make choices about what goes in and what goes out. And it's super difficult to fit this into 500 words.'"

Tworek noted that over 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair produced accountability journalism with an expose of the meat packing industry or critiquing The New York Times, etc.

By contrast, access journalists speak with politicians or other kinds of insiders, which limits their criticisms to maintain access those individuals. Donald Trump with his control of access to the White House briefing room "makes very clear some dynamics that existed beforehand."

Tworek continued, "Investigative Journalism often can be more long form, more kind of accountability journalism. Access journalism often tends to be more sort of daily, telling you what is happening, something Jay Rosen critiques as "horse race journalism", where you're just trying to see who's ahead on this day versus not.

Paying for news

Graves also noted that Robert McChesney recommended citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits at 0.15 percent of GDP with some kind of a firewall to prevent political interference in the content. Tworek replied,

“ It's really interesting to see the number of different models on the table, There's that one. ... Victor Pickard has also been pushing for those kinds of things as well. I guess what we see historically is that there are multiple different models. Potentially the key, I think, is to try out a whole bunch of them.

In Canada, where I am, because of, historically, the long fears of an over dominance of American media this, 100 years ago, pushed ... the creation of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or the CBC, ... subsidizing what's known as Canadian content. And those are government subsidies. ... French language content in Quebec, or lots of magazines that wouldn't exist because their circulation could never be big enough to cover the costs. It's a very different model than what McChesney is talking about, but it's one that has served quite a lot of democracies that kind of public funded media, but where you don't have government direction on the content. The BBC is another example of that. But of course, that also has its weaknesses ... that's, for example, contested by the Conservative Party of Canada, which, if elected, would like to defund the CDC.

Another model is the philanthropic nonprofit. But then we have the problems of, what do you do if those philanthropies aren't necessarily interested in the types of local news that might ultimately benefit democracy.

So I guess where I've come down on this a little bit is the key is to have multiple of these.

”

News deserts

Graves asked, "What's your understanding of the impact of news deserts?" Tworek replied, "what we know from the scholarship on news deserts, some of what they have done is to obviously reduce the transparency of knowing what's going on in local town and city halls and ... that potentially has deleterious effects on what public officials themselves are doing, because they act differently when they know that there are journalists who are watching them. ... [And] there's some scholarship that indicates that what this has done is change voter behavior. So then now you tend to get people voting the same party all the way down the ballot. So rather than before you might get, okay, someone's voting Republican for president, Democrat, Senator, Republican, Democrat, Republican Democrat. Now you're getting people doing more down ballot, the same party all the way down, and so that that tells you that part of it is because people perhaps have less information about what's going on the local level, so they just vote the same party as they would at the national level.

Graves mentioned a German-language article about news deserts there. Tworek replied,

“ what we do know from the German context is that the AfD, or the Alternatif für Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany, has been very active on social media, and this has been true for quite some time. ... [I]n 2017 for example, the AfD had more people following them on Facebook than the two major parties, the CDU and the SPD combined. So we know that this has been a major strategy of the AfD. It's been a huge part of what they've wanted to do is to condemn media more broadly for not covering them, not covering the issues they care about, et cetera, and then to turn to social media as an alternative space to reach people.

And of course, if you live in a news desert, but you're still searching for information, you're going to be looking to places like social media. So we start to see how all of these things connect the far right criticism of media as a whole, turning people away from media that combines with the local news desert combines with other broader reasons as to why certain groups are turning to the far right. So I'd say it's both the AfD strategy, but the other part of it is how more traditional parties have not been as active and trying to use social media to reach potential voters.

”

Internet companies are advertising companies

Graves noted that he had interviewed Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who said,

“

The shortest path to a click is anger or hate

”

Tworek replied that Facebook and other social media companies are ultimately advertising companies. "The longer you are on Facebook, etc., the more advertisements you see, the more money Facebook is making. ... [T]hey're content agnostic, because" they are looking for engagement. If negative emotions drive engagement, that will get amplified.

Tworek mentioned the recent memoir Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, which

“ indicates and argues that a lot of the people there were careless ... . They didn't have an eye to these kinds of negative effects ... . They weren't really thinking about things like content moderation until it just sort of happened. ...

[B]ut over the last few years we've seen the trust and safety teams ... have really been cut quite tremendously. ... When Elon Musk bought Twitter, made into X, boom: trust and safety team is gone. But the same is true of many companies where they've really cut those teams quite tremendously. I think that tells us a lot about their priorities.

”

After the war in Germany vs. Iraq

Graves noted that General Eisenhower, as the military governor of the American occupied zone of Germany, after World War II, reportedly told German journalists he wanted them to print whatever they wanted, even if it involved criticizing him personally. McChesney and Nichols contrasted this with the strict censorship imposed on Iraq by the US occupiers after President George W. Bush's Mission Accomplished speech, and asked Tworek's comment.

She replied that the democratization of Germany and Japan were more complicated than that brief quote from McChesney and Nichols implies. The comparison between West and East Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s was obvious to most in the West, and that made it easy for the public to embrace the US model. Of course, many of the journalists in Germany after World War II had also worked as journalists in the Nazi period when the structure was very different, as documented in research by Norbert Frei and others. The West Germany news agency, the dpa, is a cooperative, modeled after the Associated Press of the US.

The Korean War had a similar impact on public opinion and journalistic practices in Japan.

She added that the successes of democratization in West Germany and Japan after World War Two became a model for American policy makers, who try to apply that in other places and different contexts with disastrous results.

Lawsuits

Graves asked Tworek's comment on the settlement in Dominion v. Fox, which had 3 components: (1) Fox agreed that they had initially said that Biden had won the 2020 election but switched to claiming the election had been stolen from Trump after Fox saw they were losing audience to other Conservative outlets. (2) They agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million. (3) They did not have to apologize, so their audience continued unaware that they had been lied to.

Tworek replied that this "speaks to a larger dynamic of trying to solve these kinds of questions within courts and through large sums of money." As another example, she mentioned the billionaire Peter Thiel, who secretly funded a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan that brought down a news outlet. Another example is CBS paying Trump $16 million over questions about editing an interview with Kamala Harris.

She also mentioned "the weaponization in a way of court cases against media outlets ... SLAPP lawsuites (strategic lawsuit against public participation), "which cost [journalists] a lot of time and energy and are potentially used to try and push journalists away from pursuing certain lines of inquiry".

Media and public health

Tworek has several publications looking at the role of communications on public health. Countries with greater public trust of the major media tended to fare better during the COVID pandemic. British Columbia has not suffered greatly from Mpox, because the queer community there had good relations with the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control dating back to the HIV epidemic. "But that was from years of trust building. You can't just say, 'Oh, there's a pandemic today. I'm going to talk to this community, and they're going to automatically talk to you."

The media and Hitler's rise to power

Graves requested a brief summary of Tworek (2019) News from Germany. Tworek said that,

“

Part of hitler's strategy was to condemn the rest of the media for not covering the Nazis. One of their main strategies to try and get people to turn more towards Nazi newspapers, rallies, etc. ...

They take advantage of some of the things that Weimar Democracy had done. In August of 1933 Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister, gave a speech. He said, 'couldn't have come to power and maintained it like we did without the airplane and the radio. ... Hitler was flying around, and the airplane's modern invention. ... [H]e's landing, doing multiple speeches a day. Makes him seem like the modern forward leader.'

But they maintained power through the radio, because they were able to control radio content from January 1933, and that was because the Weimar state tried to ensure democracy through tight state supervision of content. 'And the more febrile Weimar democracy gets, the more they impose state supervision and control over content. ... [W]hen Hitler becomes chancellor in January 1933 it's radio content the Nazis most supervise.'

”

A substantial portion of her News from Germany describes the restrictions on the German interwar equivalent of the Associated Press, which had been the primary German news agency since the mid-nineteenth century. In the interwar period, a more right wing competitor emerged, which was mainly owned by an industrialist called Alfred Hugenberg. He does not dictate content, but he tells his employees that their reporting should be more right wing. He initially thinks that he can somewhat control Hitler. This turns out to be wholly incorrect, because in the first few months of Hitler being Chancellor, he actually forcibly merges the two news agencies and pass other laws that take away Hugenberg's power.

Selected Op-Eds

Professor Tworek's research website includes a page devoted to "Selected Op-Eds". On 2025-07-02 this included the following:

• (2025-02-06) "The Promises and Perils of Periodization in Global History: Lessons from the Inter-War Era", with Andrew Denning, discusses Eurocentrism and similar problems in selecting periods of history as foci for study.
• (2024-06-28) "Digital Regulation May Have Bolstered European Elections — but How Would We Know?" notes that (a) we cannot accurately evaluate the impact of the 2022 European Digital Services Act without access to the data collected by the commercial Internet companies, which they are loath to share with serious researchers, but (b) the effect cannot be too large, because "Low turnout has consistently plagued EP [European Parliament] elections ... . Some countries saw stunning differences between turnout for national elections and the EP. Only 40 percent of Poles voted in the EP elections, while last autumn ... [n]early 75 percent voted in their most recent national elections.
• (2024-03-13) "Digitized Newspapers and the Hidden Transformation of History" discussed how the digitization of newspapers from the eighteenth century onward have been used to dramatically improve historical research, producing scholarship that would not have been feasible previously.
• (2022-10-09) "Living in an Interwar World: Communicable Disease and Epidemic Information" describes the history of the development of standard terminology and systems for sharing disease information internationally. That includes the League of Nations Health Organization and it successor, the World Health Organization, which still needs to be improved.
• (2021-12-10) "History Explains Why Global Content Moderation Cannot Work" notes that "the United States is seen today as something of a free-speech extremist," it had previously had active censorship, "particularly when it comes to sex", including not allowing anatomy textbooks to be sent through the US Postal Service.
• (2021-08-23) "A Real History of Fake News: It has a long, not-so-illustrious past" traces the beginning of fake news to "1622, when a London printer named Nathaniel Butter made journalism history by starting the first British newspaper. ... [But] when Butter published something that was not trivial, it was often made up." That tradition continued. In 1807 Thomas Jefferson complained, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was establishment in 1906 to combat overblown claims about miracle cures, which provided a significant portion of newspapers’ revenues. And many humans believed that Hillary Clinton is into sex trafficking.
• (2019-05-26) "A Lesson From 1930s Germany: Beware State Control of Social Media" describes how efforts by Weimar Republic officials in the 1920s and early 1930s to limit the pernicious influence of misinformation and disinformation in the new medium of radio made it easy for the Nazis to control the messages reaching the public once they achieved power in 1933.
• (2019-04-25) "Information Warfare Is Here To Stay: States Have Always Fought for the Means of Communication" discussing the history of, e.g., cutting undersea cables.
• (2018-09-11) "Quietly, One of President Trump’s Tariffs Threatens American Democracy" discusses esp. a new tariff on Canadian newsprint that threatens to bankrupt small newspapers already on the edge from loss of advertising. She also summarizes the history of how the price of paper has had a major impact on newspaper publishing: "Before the 19th century, paper was mostly made from rags. The paper was very durable, but expensive. The mid-19th century development of cheap paper from groundwood pulp fueled the rise of mass-circulation newspapers. ... During World War I, however, procuring paper became problematic not only in the United States but in Britain and Germany. The British mass-market paper News of the World reduced from 16 pages in 1914 to four by 1918."

Tworek bio

Tworek is the Canada Research Chair and Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions at the University of British Columbia. Her work focuses on how new media technology and policy have impacted democracy. She is also a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ontario, as well as a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. She has co-edited four volumes and currently co-edits the Journal of Global History in addition to having published or forthcoming over 45 book chapters and journal articles in addition to numerous publications and appearances in more popular outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CBS.

The need for media reform to improve democracy

This article is part of category:Media reform to improve democracy. We describe here briefly the motivation for this series.

One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, “There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper.” McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.

At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. This encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which contributed to making the US a leader in the rate of growth in average annual income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita). Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.

That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.

In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father’s San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet. This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence worldwide, threatening democracy itself.

The threat from loss of newspapers

A previous Media & Democracy interview with Arizona State University accounting professor Roger White on "Local newspapers limit malfeasance" describes problems that increase as the quality and quantity of news declines and ownership and control of the media become more highly concentrated: Major media too often deflect the public's attention from political corruption enabled by poor media. This too often contributes to other problems like scapegoating immigrants and attacking Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) while also facilitating increases in pollution, the cost of borrowing, political polarization and violence, and decreases in workplace safety. More on this is included in other interviews in this Media & Democracy series available on Wikiversity under Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

An important quantitative analysis of the problems associated with deficiencies in news is Neff and Pickard (2024). They analyzed data on media funding and democracy in 33 countries. The US has been rated as a "flawed democracy" according to the Economist Democracy Index and spends substantially less per capita on media compared to the world's leading democracies in Scandinavia and Commonweath countries. They note that commercial media focus primarily on people with money, while publicly-funded media try harder to serve everyone. Public funding is more strongly correlated with democracy than private funding. This recommends increasing public funding for media as a means of strengthening democracy. See also "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government".

Discussion

[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources and treating others with respect.]

In a 2024-12-19 interview on the PBS News Hour, Clay Calvert, a leading First Amendment scholar and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, noted that Trump's legal actions against the media organizations have absolutely not been filed to win in court: "The real goal here is to chill the press, to have the news media engage in what we call self-censorship, to pull back their stories. So, instead of playing a watchdog role, ... what I think Trump is really trying to do is make the press be a lapdog ... . It's what we would think of sometimes as a strategic lawsuit against public participation or a SLAPP suit." Calvert was then asked if there was a concern that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court might overturn the requirement that a plaintiff in a case like this would have to prove "actual malice", per New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). Calvert agreed that Justices Thomas and Gorsuch would like to overrule the "actual malice" standard. Calvert added that in the lawsuit against ABC, there is a real tension between the news organization, ABC, and its parent, Disney, "that has other interests in the entertainment industry." He was then asked, "How should news organizations prepare" to deal with possible challenges from Trump's Department of Justice? Calvert replied, "media attorneys ... certainly are thinking about these issues. I think one of the other things we need to think about is the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, ... because Trump has threatened to revoke the licenses of stations that he believes engage in fake news, deceptive news commentary. So we have got frontal attacks in terms of lawsuits, but also I'd watch out for the FCC and its actions in the future in terms of broadcast journalism."

Similarly, Pickard (2025) said, "Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Donald Trump is a stunning display of bribery, greed, and cowardice. It’s also a symptom of deep structural rot in our media today—a system in which profit trumps democracy at every turn." Pickard noted that after the suit had been filed last October, "nearly all legal experts determined that the case was utterly meritless. Media organizations are, after all, protected by the First Amendment, and are legally and ethically permitted to make routine edits of interviews they air." But $16 million is a pittance if it helps secure approval of a $2.4 billion merger. "Trump’s legal chicanery continues his close adherence to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian playbook for undermining the free press: manipulate media law, threaten news companies’ profits, and exploit oligopolistic media ownership structures. In short, weaponize any tool at his disposal to beat media institutions into submission so that everything looks and sounds like Fox News."

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