CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Voigt, Leo |
|---|---|
| Title | Extremists or radicals: a tentative frame pattern analysis of "Ende Gelaende" in the German mainstream press and the potential role of the German domestic intelligence agency in shaping public opinion |
| Summary | This research analyses the use and relation of three frames (‘extremism’, ‘radicalism’, ‘radical isation’ ), and the mention of the German domestic intelligence agency (BfV) in newspaper articles when referring to the social movement organisation “Ende Gelände” (EG) in the German mainstream press over a period of ten years. A dataset of 407 articles, sourced from the national daily newspapers Bild, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Handelsblatt and Tageszeitung (taz) and published between 2015 and 2025, was analysed and interpreted. The existing theory that the German intelligence agency functions as a ‘hegemonic apparatus’, and that the agency has categorised EG as ‘potentially extremist’ in its official reports, allowing it to use more invasive information gathering methods, are the basis of this inquiry. The research aims at giving a tentative answer to the following question: what role does the German intelligence agency play in the portrayal of EG in the mainstream German press? After a manual coding process and the description of the findings, results are interpreted as highlighting a discursive pattern in both Die Welt and taz. Both reference the agency to a noticeable degree, but only the prior accepts its authority uncritically while the latter questions it to strengthen its counter-hegemonic narrative. The Süddeutsche shows some interpretable results, but both Bild and Handelsblatt give little insights. Rather than giving an indefinite answer, the research highlights the understudied role the intelligence agency has on the perceived legitimacy of a social movement in the German mainstream press and builds the base for further studies. |
| Supervisor | Apadin, Fulya and Sitter, Nick |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/voigt_leo.pdf |
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