World Cup Loss Dominates German News, Displacing Even a Mass Shooting

In the small German city of Stade, local residents were gripped on Tuesday by the fallout from one of Germany’s deadliest mass shootings this century. A day after a man seeking custody of his baby daughter shot and killed six social workers in the city, the deaths still dominated local news headlines, and a church held a service to help the grieving.

On Tuesday evening, prosecutors announced that they had secured an arrest warrant for the shooting suspect, who was already in police custody, on six counts of murder.

In the national news media, however, the shooting story had nearly vanished from top headlines. Though gun violence is rare in Germany, a country of strict gun laws, the coverage of the shooting had been replaced by a collective anguish over an early German exit from the men’s soccer World Cup.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, a national daily published in Munich, led its website on Tuesday morning with a package of six World Cup stories. Der Spiegel, an influential national newsmagazine, featured nine.

The coverage suggested that German media saw the shooting as a large, but local, tragedy — and the loss to Paraguay, in the tournament’s first knockout round, as a national one.

Experts said the shifting news attention was a product both of Germany’s fanatical soccer culture and of the circumstances of the shooting. Media outlets may have lost interest when the authorities revealed that the alleged shooter’s motive was linked to a domestic dispute, as opposed to terrorism, said Christian von Sikorski, a professor of communication at the Free University Berlin.

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