The term “alternative media” gained a negative undertone during the last decade because right-wing or populist movements claimed the term and defined it differently. Without going into details, it can be stated that these kinds of media find an ideal medium on the Internet and will not be tackled here. Instead, we discuss minority and community media.
German society is very dynamic and heterogeneous. Minority representation in the media has different strands and can be differentiated along a horizontal and a vertical line. Along the horizontal line, we find various minorities under- or misrepresented in well-established and legacy media, grouped around diversity categories like race, class, gender, sexual preferences, (dis)ability, and others. On the vertical line, we see evidence that people with migration backgrounds lack equal participation opportunities to access jobs as editorial staff in the media. Sustainable diversity concepts are not in place even in public service media, which are obliged to serve society as a whole (Horz, 2020). Minority groups with Turkish and Polish roots who form the largest and longest resident immigrant groups in Germany are barely represented in national legacy media. The public service media are obliged by law to reach minorities, but reduced their multilingual target group radio programmes during the last decade. Under the aegis of ARD, only one Arabic language radio programme exists (Cosmo, ARD-cooperation). Radyo Metropol is the only important commercial Turkish radio programme in Germany, produced in Berlin.
However, diversity is dealt with in public service media and largely understood as a holistic cross-sectional task. This process is located in different areas of responsibility, and work contexts such as corporate planning, personnel development, commissioners for cultural diversity, integration, and gender and diversity. This includes continuing education programmes, journalistic internships, discussion events, and measures for personnel development and recruitment.
About a quarter of citizens have a so-called migration background. Since refugee immigration in 2015, the ethnic diversity of society has significantly increased. Public service media serve refugees and new residents with online offers like WDR for you in the four most-spoken languages of refugees. Immigrants also use Web 2.0 media as opportunities to inform and communicate directly with their communities. The largest Syrian network in Germany is Syrian House, run by a Syrian media specialist currently with over 257,000 members on Facebook. These media services, however, exist in niches; in mainstream nationwide and legacy media, refugees are mostly the objects – not the subjects – of reporting (Fengler & Kreutler, 2020), with a few exceptions in target-group content.
The small and long-existing official national minorities like Danes, Sorbes, Frisians, or the German Sinti and Roma are selectively provided with mother-tongue programmes in few public service media and not-for-profit radios or newspapers, like the Danish Flensborg Avis. The Sorbes in Saxonia, for instance, are provided with a radio programme by the public service broadcaster MDR. The Sinti and Roma produce their Romanes programme Latscho Dibes [Good day] in a not-for-profit radio project in Hildesheim and are represented with one seat in the broadcasting council of the public service broadcaster SWR.
Apart from that, media from former home countries have produced newspapers for minorities like Turkish immigrants in Germany since the 1960s. The last decade not only disrupted the German print sector at large, but also those daily and weekly newspapers produced for the local minority groups in Germany. The Turkish newspaper market in Germany collapsed, and one of the biggest dailies, Hürriyet, stopped their production in Germany in 2013 because of a massive loss of readers.
Commercial television stations for Turkish-speaking and other minority groups in Germany still exist and are available plentifully via satellite, YouTube, or streaming. With the Turkish minority in Germany divided between those in favour and those against President Erdogan, the media market reflects this split. In 2017, the Turkish opposition channel Arti.TV was founded by exiled journalists in Cologne and is available via YouTube.
There are increased media offers for post-migrant communities, defined as new social groups consisting of people with or without a migrant background and who are linked to transcultural media products. Younger audiences can find those products in the public service media channel funk on YouTube, for example, the show Datteltäter. Another example is the online magazine Migazin, founded and run by Ekrem Şenol and recipient of the Grimme-Online Award for its quality content.
Other, smaller communities with fewer resources – like LGBTI+ community or communities of those with disabilities – also run small media enterprises, thanks to the opportunities the Internet offers. For example, a group of people with Down Syndrome founded the periodical Ohrenkuss in 1998, which is also available online.
