Intro: German Elections and the American Media

As an American studying in Germany of course I am interested in what my German classmates think about the American governmental system, politicians, and our foreign policy. However what I forgot to consider is how little my American classmates back home know about the German system. It is not standard learning in high school so unless one has a special interest or is a Political science or International Relations major they would have little knowledge of it outside of what can be found in the newspapers or on CNN. With the recent 2009 parliamentary elections I thought for sure there would be more information out there. However, I remember when I read about the elections I read about it on Deutsche Welle, a German government sponsored news site and the BBC, a British and arguably European website. I began to realize that I couldn’t recall any American news from the election last year and begun digging. Doing a basic ProQuest search for periodicals brought up tones of results from the campaign trail and the results broken down into what it could me for Europe and the world. However, most of these were translated articles from German papers or from British reports. Americas major media outlets had a poor showing and what it did cover was mostly the results of the election. For more information in on the elections I had to dig into more independent, less circulated media outlets such as National Public Radio and Bloomberg. Stay tuned as I try to decipher and explain the American media’s perspective on international elections…namely the German Bundestag elections in 2009.