From party soldier to real journalist : Professional identity and media systems in transition

This paper concerns East German journalists and the changes they have undergone, from working in the totalitarian regime of GDR to enter a western liberal media system. The purpose is to study how professional identity is created in a controlled and authoritarian media system, and how this identity and the journalistic values changes in a transition phase. Through qualitative in-depth interviews with six former East German journalists, who all has worked as journalists after the wall broke down, we are exploring how their journalistic values and the conception of their profession has changed during this tumultuous time. We selected journalists with experience of working in both East Germany and united Germany to be able to see these changes. The result shows that the journalists from GDR used an inner opposition, both to survive the dictatorship and to adapt to the new reality. This means that their level of professionalization, despite the fact that they lived under oppression, was relatively high. In between these two systems a journalistic vacuum occurred which show that a different, more democratic, way of organizing the press is possible. In this vacuum the values of the journalists could be expressed in a way that wasn’t possible in GDR, nor in united Germany