Besides monitoring the media in academic research projects, there are several mechanisms to perform the watchdog function on the media. First, there is media coverage about media performance, like the weekly television magazine ZAPP of the regional public television broadcaster NDR, or @mediasres from Deutschlandfunk. The magazine is one of few exceptions in the German media landscape, because of a systematic cut-down or complete abolishment of critical media rubrics in newspapers during the last decade.
Second, the shift from mass media control towards independent online watchdogs has intensified. One successful example is Über Medien, founded and run by the journalist Stefan Niggemeier. Über Medien monetises their quality content through a subscription model and has successfully attracted some 4,000 subscribers, proof that there exists a demand for media critique.
Third, media observers in specialised Internet blogs still exist. Several blogs comment on just one newspaper, like bildblog.de on the most-read tabloid, BILD-Zeitung. Others focus on specific media segments like public service media. One example is a not-for-profit association that runs the blog Publikumsrat.de, which constructively criticises, but also defends, the public service media against populist voices who would rather see public service media abolished. One can assume that the reach of media blogs is still low, but the last decade proved that they function as an important driving force for a wider debate about media pluralism and quality of news media. However, a parallel development is the emergence of watchdogs from the populist and right-wing segment of the political spectrum. Their aim is not to constructively criticise and safeguard a pluralistic and democratic media system, but to get rid of media and media institutions offering unbiased information. Overall, the public debate about the media has become more antagonistic.
Fourth, there is still some institutionalised control of the media. The Landesmedienanstalten – the publicly funded supervising authorities for commercial television – control the content of the commercial programmes in every federal state according to the standards of their broadcasting licence. These standards include, most prominently, a minimum quota of news and cultural programmes, and threshold values for the ratio of advertising and programme content.
Public service broadcasting is to some extent supervised by special broadcasting councils representing highly influential social groups, such as unions and representatives of the state and the church, which consequently indicates a certain amount of political influence on public broadcasting.
The press is supervised by the Press Council, a co-determination body offering ethical guidelines for journalists in the Pressekodex. The guidelines are not unanimously accepted anymore, because of major changes in the discrimination act after sexual harassments during New Year’s Eve 2015, attributed to immigrants. In the aftermath, moral panic and ethnosexism were rising, provoking the Press Council to weaken the discrimination act and to link the mention of the migration background of a suspect in the public interest (Dietze, 2017; Horz, 2017). In comparison with the MDM 2011 (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011), the above-mentioned institutionalised mechanisms of control of the controllers stand in opposition to heated public discussions in Internet fora, which sometimes gain a lot of public attention. On the other hand, constructive discussions on media ethics and the media’s performance for democracy remain restricted to very specialised media coverage, expert circles, or events.
