While only a few interviewed journalists and editors made remarks about the watchdog role, they did comment on the importance of investigative reporting as an important factor in their everyday work. This may correlate with previous studies, which showed that no more than 24 per cent of German journalists see themselves as watchdogs (Weischenberg et al., 2006: 106–110 & 279). We observed a different situation compared with MDM 2011 (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011). The editor-in-chief of Süddeutsche Zeitung stated that the watchdog role is very important. Interviewees of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, RTL, and the public service broadcaster ZDF invested in a specific investigative unit because they perceive investigative journalism as an asset in an overall highly competitive market, and normatively more important than ever.
One successful example of journalism’s watchdog role is Ibiza-Gate, where Spiegel and SZ-Online published a video on 17 May 2019 in which the readiness of the former vice-chancellor of Austria to commit corruption and take over and control an independent newspaper was revealed.
The editor-in-chief of Stern, however, critically assesses that the watchdog role has been replaced by the role of journalism as a press office. Journalism is seen as too fixated on the elites, and the watchdog function is not taken seriously in German journalism any more. Other journalists differentiate between their own research, in the sense of journalistic quality norms and investigative research, in the sense of in-depth research for a longer period and with greater intensity. The first is perceived as increasingly important to safeguard the legitimacy of journalism. The latter, however, is seen as a long-term process which is not a matter of course and needs to be equipped with more resources to become a stable part of editorial units. Only the editor-in-chief of RTL, and those in RTL’s school of journalism, mentioned investigative journalism as part of the company’s mission statement: “We have the [research] team here, where we do investigative journalism and it can happen that a colleague works on a topic for eight months”.
Like in MDM 2011 (Marcinkowski & Donk, 2011), there are no mission statements that explicitly advertise active investigative journalism. On the other hand, digitisation is seen as an important task for the leading news media, where resources are invested. The assumptions of the global journalism project –mentioned in MDM 2011, concerning German journalists’ obligation towards the watchdog role – is no longer as important (Hanitzsch et al., 2016: 2). Only 36.3 per cent perceive their role in “monitoring political leaders”, whereas the commitment to “report things as they are” scores over 90 per cent in the sample; hence, they play not so much the watchdog role, but rather the role of the uninvolved observer. This outcome corroborates the hypothesis that objectivity is the highest value of journalists in Germany, which, on the other hand, also means that they may not be aware of (re)framing and the implications of the theory of constructivism for their work (Hillje, 2017).
