ABSTRACT
In Austrian parliamentary election campaigns, labels such as "war room" or "spin doctors" come increasingly and prominently to light in the public discourse. Because the media are the primary source for electoral and campaign information for the Austrian public, they play a central role in putting spotlights on this transformation of political campaigning. The interest in news in the Austrian public is outstanding in the European comparison. Only in Scandinavian countries is the level of news consumption higher. The outlined manifestations of transnational media logic are, however, not characterized by a perfect state of universal harmonization. Therefore, the ongoing trends should not be interpreted as tendencies toward a universal standardization. Almost half of the political stories in the Austrian media during the 2006 campaign predominantly focused on non-policy and thus game-centered views on politics and elections. The media-transmitted election campaign itself was imprinted by analytical assessments of the twelve aired television debates among the front-runners of the parties.
