Negative news dominates television news programs

To this end, a quantitative media content analysis was carried out over the course of a week on the public broadcasters "Tagesschau" and "Heute" as well as the private broadcasters "RTL Aktuell" and "Sat. 1 Nachrichten". The contributions were evaluated for their neutral, negative or positive valence as well as the topic categories. 

In the week of the survey, around 146 posts were characterized by negativism, 123 were neutral and nine were positive. An increased negative bias was particularly evident in social and foreign policy topics. Domestic policy, on the other hand, was largely neutral. The news reports analyzed were therefore predominantly negative.

For Professor Hermanni from the SRH Fernhochschule, there is a good reason why domestic politics is largely kept neutral: "Public service broadcasting is obliged to be balanced and it fulfills this mandate especially when it comes to domestic political issues. No wonder, because party representatives sit on the supervisory committees and control reporting in their own interests."

A comparison of the public and private news programs showed that "Tagesschau" had a balance between negative and neutral contributions. In the public service program "Heute", the negative valence predominated minimally. A similar picture emerged for "Sat. 1 Nachrichten". The program "RTL Aktuell", on the other hand, had significantly more negative reporting. There were a total of 50 negative, 36 neutral and only six positive reports. "One reason for this negative dominance is that social issues received the most airtime. As the analysis showed, this genre is clearly negative in all programs," says Tatjana Schiller from SRH Fernhochschule. Social issues include reports on misfortunes such as thefts, crimes, deaths and environmental problems.

"The study has thus shown that prime-time television news coverage is clearly negative. This naturally also has an impact on viewers' perception of their own ways of thinking and views on life, as well as on world events. In this context, the question arises as to why the television news does not show positive events that occur worldwide on a daily basis to a greater extent," concludes Professor Hermanni.