Campaign issues in political strategies and press coverage: The rental law conflict in the 1982–1983 election campaign in the federal republic of Germany

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Abstract
Election campaigns are institutionalized conflicts which are carried out in and through the mass media. Success and defeat in these conflicts depend upon the communication strategies of the parties and on the reactions of the journalists. In the election campaign of 1982–1983, the campaign manager of the Christian Democrats succeeded in altering the conflict over the new rental law into a conflict over the credibility of the SPD‐opposition. Thus, he created a counterpart to the criticism directed against the federal government. The newspapers and weekly news magazines did not take sides in the conflict through explicit evaluations, but rather by emphasizing or neglecting issues in favor of one party. The conflict carried out in the mass media over the rental law was not a rational discourse in which the conflict parties mutually referred to each other and accepted each other's communicative claims. Rather, the nature of the conflict communication was rhetorical; it was a “battle for public opinion.”