The Institute of Media Studies belongs to of the Faculty of Arts, and has been in existence since October 2010. However, the scientific foundations were laid in the early 1970s, when the Tübingen linguist Erich Strassner and his colleagues started examining the language used in the radio and TV news. They criticized the "tremendous complexity", the "almost criminal convolutions" and the "language fence" that made the media consumer "vulnerable to manipulation" (Der Spiegel 29/1972, p. 103). Many journalists initially responded with indignation, but then they began to reconsider their own craft. Tübingen's media researchers were invited to train the journalists. There then followed decades of research in constant interaction with the industry. The result was the post-graduate program "Media Studies - Media Practice", set up in 1991 by Manfred Muckenhaupt as the first media-based course at the University of Tübingen. This was the seed from which today's Institute of Media Studies grew.
