ABSTRACT
This chapter recommends a historical perspective on mediatization with the critical incident of the 1962 Spiegel Affair. The incident was triggered by a long and critical feature story about German forces and their ability to protect the country in a confrontation with the armies of the Warsaw Pact in the news magazine Der Spiegel. In the immediate aftermath of the events, German journalists showed support for and solidarity with Der Spiegel and condemned the actions of the state. While the Spiegel employees were imprisoned, journalistic resistance against the government started to form. Mediatization of politics was then mostly understood as politics being dominated by the media. With mediatization as the theoretical framework, we look at the implications for the power relations between press and politics. For each of the dimensions, J. Stromback also describes historical phases in which the mediatization of politics takes place, which is crucial for the analysis of the Spiegel Affair as a critical incident.
