Do daily newspapers of former West and East Germany cover crime in a different way?
The question investigated in the presented paper is whether crime is discussed differently in the media of former East and West Germany, how it is weighted and whether the real crime situation provides an explanation for any differences in press coverage. The study showed that there are no significant differences in the press coverage and that violent crime is not overrepresented. Coverage of offences like robbery, damage to property, sexual assaults or bodily injury, which are also categorized as violent crime, was of average frequency, so that again there was no overrepresentation in the newspapers of the two cities compared in this study (Stuttgart and Dresden). Surprisingly, sexual offences such as rape or sexual abuse played a minor role in the daily newspapers. Further interesting results of the analysis were that offences in the field of “intelligent crime” (e. g. white-collar crime) were of no importance in the print media, whereas the number of reports on crimes for which the
