The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
This week we ponder, in our politics section, Germany’s ‘Valley of the Clueless’, where Cold War access to Western TV was most limited. Could this be linked to the emergence of ultra-conservative politics in parts of modern Germany?
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin where a lack of access to information is never the issue – this week including a wonderful piece of content about the ‘five stages of margarine grief’.
Valley of the Clueless
Image taken from original source
We were fascinated by this short article on Germany’s ‘Valley Of The Clueless’. The term describes two areas of East Germany, within parts of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, and Saxony regions, where a lack of access to broadcast news was said to result in lower levels of general awareness. As the piece puts it, “West German television was generally considered to be superior and have more reliable news coverage, and thus, the populations in parts of former East Germany that had no access to this were mocked for being out of sync with the latest West German and world news.”
It is interesting to compare the location of these areas with the distribution of contemporary support for Germany’s far right AFD party. In recent years the AFD have repeatedly done best in regions that were formerly part of East Germany. This BBC piece shows the distribution of their 2020 support, which is particularly pronounced in the Saxony area (in 2016, meanwhile, it was most concentrated in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). And this academic paper looks in more detail at the reasons why the areas behind the Iron Curtain might have been more drawn to the radical right.
There is, no doubt, a range of reasons for the development of contemporary German politics along Cold War lines. Media access in the immediate post-war decades is only a small part of the picture. But it is nevertheless useful – at a point in time where state media in Russia carry a powerful sway over public opinion about Ukraine – to ponder the role that access to trusted media sources plays in forming attitudes. And it is helpful to think about why, exactly, communities that are digitally, socially and culturally more networked are often more liberal or progressive.
And finally, Charlie’s Attic, the TCC valley where the clueless and the clued-up vie for primacy:
