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.
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 Though gun violence is rare in Germany, a country of strict gun laws, the coverage of the shooting had been replaced by a collective anguish over an early German exit from the men’s soccer World Cup.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.
Some critical readers, he said, will look at Tuesday’s coverage and say, “Hey, how important is soccer actually now? A violent crime happened here and so on. But it is often the case that traditional media coverage still sets the agenda.”
On Tuesday morning, that agenda was firmly focused on the national soccer team and its performance, none more than in an editorial by a sports editor for Der Spiegel, Peter Ahrens.
“Germany, once a great football nation and four-time world champion, has shrunk to a football minnow,” he wrote.
The shift in media attention, experts said, was partly because Germany is a nation steeped in soccer tradition, having won four World Cups, most recently in 2014. The sport remains a national unifier amid great divisions over political issues, like immigration, and the economic inequities that have persisted since the former East and West Germany reunified after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“Soccer is incredibly important in Germany, and what happened yesterday was a national disaster,” Dr. Marcus Maurer, chair of political communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, said in an email on Tuesday.
“I don’t think the media is deliberately downplaying the Stade incident,” he added. “I think it will resurface if, for example, new information about the perpetrator comes to light.”
This spring, in the run-up to the tournament, German outlets often elevated coverage of team controversies over stories on trans-Atlantic relations, wars in Ukraine and Iran and the faltering German economy.
When Berlin buzzed briefly with rumors of an intraparty challenge to Friedrich Merz’s chancellorship, the story competed for attention with a debate over whom the national team should start at goalkeeper.
Experts suggested on Tuesday that the media focus on soccer, over the shooting, was also a function of the news cycle.
The game finished deep into the German night, and the shooting story had not developed further. Police continued to cordon off the crime scene on Tuesday, but in an impromptu briefing with more than a dozen reporters, a spokesman mostly repeated the previous night’s updates.
The shooting remained the top story only in Stade, where a small crowd of residents gathered near the shooting site on Tuesday.
Lukas Lemek, 48, of Stade, criticized the police for not shooting the suspect as he fled. He also blamed migration to Germany for the shooting, given the suspect’s family roots in Turkey. Mr. Lemek was born in Poland, he said, but has lived in Germany for 33 years.
“The politics are sick, and that’s why this happens, and it will keep happening,” he said. “So this country is going to ruin.”
A reporter asked if Mr. Lemek was bothered by the gap in media attention, between the shooting and the World Cup. He scoffed.
“Nobody cares about football,” he said.
Tatiana Firsova contributed reporting from Berlin.
