Framing Political Change A comparative analysis of the role played by media in the political transitions of Spain (1981) and the German Democratic Republic (1989)

Abstract

This article chooses a comparative approach in order to analyze the role played by mass media during the attempted coup d’état in Spain starting on 23 February 1981 and the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Both episodes demonstrate the media's capacity to articulate political change through their contextualization of particular events. The text focuses on the capacity of the media to frame political episodes, to generate interpretations and thus provide the basis for specific reactions in different audience groups or political instances. For a short period of time (limited to just some hours), the radio and the press in Spain as well as television in East Germany assumed a ‘para-political’ role and set certain events in motion that led to the end of the coup and the fall of the Wall respectively.