Tagesschau or heute?
In our last week’s session „Inside the news media“ we talked about the 8 o’clock Tagesschau. As a person who frequently watches this summary of news on ARD I was surprised by our findings. Did you ever notice, that the Taggeschau mostly focusses on politics, politicians and big companies? What about non-politicians, small companies and culture? I must admit, as a student of politics I was never surprised to watch news which were dominated by politicial elites and their decisions, since they somehow controle each and everything. Nevertheless, there always are and there always need to be other relevant topics or people to be covered and interviewed by the Tagesschau in order to ensure free and substantial news.
The fact that the Tagesschau deliberately skipped to report on the arrest of the murder of a killed german girl made me think whether it would be good to change my daily habit and start watching the news on ZDF called „heute“. So tonight I took a pen and paper to compare the 10 minute heute to the 15 minute Tagesschau in order to see if there are any differences at all.
Both started their report with the attacks in Istanbul and Kairo, which did not surprise me since I already came across these topics on my phone. On both channels they displayed interviews of eyewitnesses and Erdogan’s speech. Syria’s problem with the ISIS and Italy’s problem with finding a new president have also been covered by both Tagesschau and heute. Same applied for Trump’s opinion on several policies and the fact that the movie„Toni Erdmann“ won a number of prices at the European movie awards . The only differences I found were those, that the Tagesschau also covered today’s change in the timetable and prices of the Deutsche Bahn and that a church in Nigeria collapsed. The reports on sports and the weather weren’t as extended at heute as they were at Tagesschau, which might be affiliated to their lack of time (10min).
To be honest: the results did not really surprise me. But I am now curious to find out whether these findings are also true for the channel’s „longer“ news (tonight’s Tagesschau/Tagesthemen at 11.15pm which last 30 minutes …and tomorrow‘s heute at 7pm which last 25 minutes).In my next blog I will keep you guys updated if I stumble across some interesting differences.
