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66 | THE PROFESSIONALISM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

CAMPAIGNING WITH TELEVISION
The elections of the 1970s are usually called the first television elections in Germany.
Until then, campaigns were dominantly print-oriented although political advertising
went on television as early as 1957. ‘The 1976 German federal elections constituted a
turning point in how the political parties perceived the mass media’.This statement was
made by Max Kaase (1986), who associated this development with the fact ‘that the
1976 federal elections were the first in which Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann applied her
spiral of science theory to the analysis of the political process in Germany (p. 97).
According to Noelle-Neumann, the climate of opinion, which individuals perceive by
directly observing their environment and through the use of the media, influences
opinion formation at the individual level, thus having an effect on the election
outcome. Based on data from the 1976 national elections, Noelle-Neumann (1977)
identified a ‘double climate of opinion’ in Germany. In that year, the number of voters
intending to vote for the then-governing parties, SPD/FDP, and the opposition parties,
CDU/CSU, was about the same throughout the summer right up to Election Day in
October 1976. However, the chances of victory accorded to the CDU/CSU dropped
continually – a development that was seen most dramatically when analysing regular
television viewing figures. Since the Christian Democrats fell just short of the absolute
majority in 1976, the obvious conclusion was that the election had been decided on
television (cf. also Kaase, 1989). Noelle-Neumann (1980) named two reasons why
television created the impression that the SPD/FDP would win the election. First, left-
liberal sympathies are greater among journalists than in the general population. As
such, they evaluated the situation differently:‘The journalists did not manipulate, that’s
simply how they saw the situation’ (p. 232). Second, the climate of opinion transmitted
by the media was nourished by optical and verbal signs of public opinion (pp.
237–239). For this latter claim, Noelle-Neumann referred to a study done by Kepplinger
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
(1980), who analysed ‘optical commentary’ during television coverage of elections. He
found that the opposition candidates were portrayed to their detriment and the
government candidates to their benefit. This optical commentary was picked up by
people who watched a lot of television, and they started to see Kohl, who was the
chancellor candidate of the CDU/CSU,as heading towards defeat in the election.

Political actors were quick to take up the spiral of science theory and revise their
strategies accordingly. The campaign manager of the CDU, Peter Radunski, capsulated
the reactions at that time with his now often quoted phrase,‘Elections can be won and
lost on television’ (1986 p. 131), which also led him to propagate the idea of the
Americanisation of campaigning. Convinced that it had become the most important
medium, campaigners started to focus on television and embarked on two broad
strategies. On the one hand, they moved towards a more proactive communication
management to enhance the chances for their messages being taken over by television
as frequently and as much unchanged as possible. On the other hand, they began to
closely watch what was reported and who appeared, and for how long, on television. As
a consequence, television stations came under considerable pressure and reacted with
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