Cold War or Inner Unity? How a New Generation of Journalists Challenge Persistent Bias in Reporting East Germany in DIE ZEIT

Despite German unity having been completed more than 30 years ago, the media’s portrayal of East Germany, formerly GDR, has been consistently negative. East Germans were stereotypically portrayed as right-wing extremists, as passive and exotic ‘Others’; while the East itself was constructed as a ‘foreign country’. This affected almost all national news media anchored in the West. However, when right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) rose to power, national news media started to change course. The dominant weekly DIE ZEIT opened a news office staffed exclusively with East Germans—in Leipzig, the centre of East Germany. How did this unique measure of newsroom diversity affect the overall media discourse in DIE ZEIT? This chapter seeks to answer this question by examining a 5-year period from 2015 to 2019, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The chapter suggests that the driving force for change is indeed a new generation of young, self-aware journalists, born just before or after the “Wende” (fall of the Berlin Wall); born in the East – but raised in Germany as a whole. This article examines to what extent this new generation of journalists was able to transform decades of negative reporting of “the East”.