Expert Stefan Magnet says the company Austrian Media Analysis (MA) annually reviews the reach of all daily newspapers. Outlets such as Krone, Kurier, Standard, Presse & Co offered no alternative views, but their monopoly is crumbling, Wochenblick reported.
In figures, that means that in just six years, 400 000 readers have been lost to daily newspapers. The figure is truly huge. It is as if all inhabitants of the cities of Linz and Salzburg suddenly refused to read such newspapers.
In fact, the current media analysis confirmed that all daily newspapers in Austria have a net reach of 64.6 percent, or some 4.8 million readers, a new low.
In 2011, all daily newspapers reached 5.2 million readers. Especially the big tabloids such as Kronen Zeitung and Kurier have been sinking for years.
According to media analysis, Kronen aimed at 38.2 percent of its “possible” readers in 2017, but reached “only” 29.2 percent in their highest-circulation, even if it remains the undisputed number one. Heute is currently at 12.6 percent.
Brand managers, editors-in-chief and publishing bosses have offered various excuses for their dismal performances. They bemoan the “dying of the print media” because young readers are online.
But it has become clear that the collapse does not apply to all print media. From 2016 to 2017, the Standard was able to increase its readership range from 5.3 to 6.5 percent. Thus newspapers that follow a clear and transparent line, also receive the necessary trust from their readers.
The media, however, who want to dictate their dubious moral ideas from above, will lose their readers in the future, Konrad Paul Liessmann believes.
In February 2017, the essayist and cultural journalist from ORF argued that the Austrian media user has been “surrounded by moral authorities” in recent years.
Perhaps, according to the Viennese university professor, ordinary people have been confronted with “too much morality”. There may not have been a lack of moral imperatives, according to Liessmann, but those often need to be accompanied by some measure of credibility.
“Because if such moral proposals come from those who are basically unaffected, who actually have no worries about the workplace, those not existentially threatened by the refugee crisis, who have no fear of their children being pushed out – because they will go to Oxford or Stanford to study – then that does not look very convincing,” Liessmann argues.
If these moral high priests “who obviously live in better living conditions than a large number of their readers, also decide which information is ‘socially relevant’ as ARD “editor-in-chief Kai Gniffke said, then the readers will turn away more and more.”
Credibility is lost he says. “Frequently the big media colossi are radically positioning themselves against their own readers. When in 2015 the asylum wave rolled over Austria, the red-black government broke its own laws and the rule of law was annulled, all media co-hosted this invasion and wrote of ‘the night of humanity’ and ‘Austria shows a big heart’.”
The German Bild-Zeitung blatantly fabricated propaganda for a war of aggression against Syria, and as a last resort of loud protest, comments against the war filled columns on Facebook.
The boycott of German tabloid Bild will probably continue too. Every year, about 200 000 Germans buy less from publisher Springer.