Andreas Elter

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Andreas Elter (* 1968 ) is a German historian and media scientist , he is the nationwide course director for journalism at the Macromedia University for Media and Communication . Before that, he worked for more than 15 years as an editor and reporter for WDR, ZDF and RTL.

Career

After studying in Cologne, he received his doctorate from the University of Cologne with a dissertation on the subject of media in war: freedom of the press and national security in the second half of the 20th century under Jürgen Heideking .

As an editor and reporter he worked for ZDF, WDR, Deutschlandfunk, Westfälische Rundschau and DPA; In 2000 he switched to RTL. Since 2007 he has been teaching journalism at the Macromedia University for Media and Communication , where he is a professor.

Elter is also head of the television and design department at the ARD.ZDF medienakademie .

Elter previously held teaching positions at the universities in Leipzig, Cologne and Munich and did research at the German Historical Institute in the USA, in the National Archives in Maryland and at Duke University in North Carolina.

During his practical training, Elter worked at the RTL journalism school , the German Association of Journalists and the German Radio Academy .

Publications

As a non-fiction author, he has published on the history of US press policy in times of war and the media strategies of terrorist groups.

The War Sellers, 2005

Bernd Greiner reviews positively in ZEIT that Elter shows “what institutional and propaganda effort had to be made to keep the home front stable, how the political instruments changed over the decades, when an appeal to patriotism was sufficient and under what conditions a policy of deliberate lies had to come into play. ”Greiner finds the evidence astonishing how pronounced the tendency of opinion-leading media is to let go of any critical claim and to become the fourth arm of the government:

"It is thanks to their anticipatory obedience and their self-censorship that direct censorship by the state remained only one of many and often a subordinate instrument of opinion control."

Elter posed the decisive question for the future, whether the periodic inactivation of the self-correcting mechanisms of a democratic system "does not end up poisoning democracy at its roots."

Propaganda indeed, 2008

Thomas Speckmann ( Die Welt ) finds Andreas Elter's first comparison of the history, tactics and communication strategies of the RAF with Al-Qaida remarkable. According to Elter, the Islamists had primarily relied on extremely ruthless action terrorism, which is targeted against bystanders. This does not mean, however, that they are pursuing completely different communication strategies than the RAF with their "declaratory terrorism" which is supposedly only characteristic of them. Al-Qaeda directs its statements to Arabic-speaking target groups. A second parallel are the confession videos. Al-Qaeda stages its actions in a media-appropriate manner and with mass-media timing, like the RAF before.

According to Elter's "lucid" analysis, the Internet resolves the systemic contradiction of a terrorist organization: to operate clandestinely and at the same time have to act publicly.

Works (selection)

  • US Media at War: Freedom of the Press and National Security in the Second Half of the 20th Century. Dissertation 2000.
  • The War Seller History of US Propaganda 1917-2005 . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-518-12415-3 .
  • Propaganda indeed: the RAF and the media . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-12514-4 .
  • Beer tent or blog? Politics in the digital age . 1st edition. Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-86854-216-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Bernd Greiner: When wars become commodities . In: The time . January 12, 2006, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed January 18, 2020]).
  2. Thomas Speckmann: Propaganda and Terror Today . June 6, 2009 ( welt.de [accessed January 18, 2020]).