Televised Political Talk Shows and the Mainstreaming of Far-Right Viewpoints in German Times of "Crisis"

Political debate programmes go a long way back in German history. After the end of World War II, the Allies occupying Germany established the format to teach the Germans lessons in democratic values and debating culture. Nowadays, political talk shows can be watched on television daily, where a moderator discusses with a few guests like politicians, journalists, and civil society actors a previously agreed upon topic. However, dissatisfaction with the format is on the rise; the German Cultural Council recently recommended that televised political talk shows take a year-long hiatus to re-think their framing strategies, while the supervisory bodies of the public TV channels themselves offered scathing critiques of the increasingly sensationalist and ”populist” presentation of topics and character of the debates. Whereas it is widely accepted that private and tabloid media’s regular invocation of crises and their polarising black-and-white style of coverage is helpful for extremist political challengers, a potentially similar role of public media is generally less explored and especially when it comes to political talk shows. This chapter of my monographical PhD on the construction of political identities by the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) builds on these critiques but also explores, from a discourse-theoretical perspective, the influence (or not) of televised political talk shows on the success of those constructions. To do so, I first ask if debates related to the bread-and-butter topics of the far-right such as migration, criminality, integration, or terrorism, are more frequent in number and more likely to be framed in overly exaggerated dooms-day terms than other topics. Illustrative titles of such debates are: ”Fear of refugees: reject, exclude, deport?” or ”New Germany - does toughness against migrants result in more security?”. This will be done via a content analysis of 291 talk shows as they were aired on public television networks ARD and ZDF, starting from the AfD’s turn towards a clearly nativist programme during the ”migration crisis” in the summer of 2015 until their breakthrough into the national parliament in the autumn of 2017. Second, in a more qualitative way, I analyse via three full talk show debates how mainstream actors react to the challenges put forward by their far-right competitors and what strategies the latter use to make their claims seem natural, common-sensical, and having wide-spread support in the population. Additionally, I investigate how far-right political actors construct supposedly pre-existing identities in the electorate through representative claims such as ”we have to take the fears of Germans seriously” in the first place and how a sensationalist media coverage helps them formulate a perpetual cycle of perceived crises around security, values, and identity itself.