Diplomarbeiten

'I listened to the entire festivity and I was appalled. There were small television excerpts being offered with some clowns, some nonsense, idiocy, filth, complete filth. This is what is being broadcasted in Germany each day. The directors say that the audience wishes so, as if the audience was a crowd of idiots.' On October 11th, 2008, German literature critic Marcel Reich Ranicki rejected the German Television Prize honouring him for his lifetime achievement. In front of rolling cameras, Ranicki made his standpoint very clear that he finds the current television landscape rubbish and dull. His words are the result of 25 years of private televisual content development in Germany. Today's media environment has changed drastically. Each day we find more and more TV programmes which are designed for an audience that demands no intellectual work and wants to be entertained. This matter of entertainment has exclusively formed the television networks' programming strategies concerning their content. Consequently, the offer of daily soaps ('GZSZ'), reality TV ('Big Brother', 'Dschungelcamp') and game/casting shows ('Deutschland sucht den Superstar") has risen, while the offer of classical formats such as fiction film, documentaries and sophisticated programmes ('Das literarische Quartett') has decreased.

Problem Formulation:

Since the establishment of private broadcasting in 1984, the television offering in Germany has not only changed quantitatively but also qualitatively. Today, we have a range of more than 50 German private TV broadcasters with an enormous variety of programmes. In recent years, we have been experiencing a downward trend of content quality, which is defined as 'dumbing down'. The problem arises that in the battle for ratings, intellectual demand fades into the background of sole entertainment. This approach has evolved into the main content portfolio strategy of private television. But is it only the private broadcasters' blame or are ARD and ZDF also striving for audience ratings in their programming methods? Is television in fact dumbing the culture down or is it making it smarter? Which side triggered the effect of 'dumbing down' - the media or the audience? These questions still remain unanswered. Therefore, this paper intends to analyse the matter of 'dumbing down' as well as the interrelated content portfolio strategy.