Negative by Design: Media Frames of Hackers in Germany

This paper examines how the term ‘hacker’ is framed in German mainstream media. It presents a longitudinal content analysis of 301 publicly accessible articles from four widely circulated German news outlets (Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bild, and Der Spiegel), sampled from January 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. The analysis shows a strong predominance of negative connotations and recurring frames that associate hackers with criminality, geopolitical aggression, and digital attack. Drawing on framing research, scandalization theory, and the concept of media reality, the paper interprets these representations as patterned constructions rather than isolated lexical choices. The contribution of the study lies in empirically documenting how a socially salient cybersecurity figure is represented across a bounded longitudinal sample of German reporting. The paper concludes by discussing implications for public understandings of cybersecurity and by outlining the methodological limits of the selected corpus.