Immediately after the nomination of Hitler as Reich Chancellor in January 1933, the Nazi regime began to systematically streamline the entire German media and culture industry under the leadership of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. After a flurry of early separate bans, the Reichskulturkammer was established in September 1933 to regulate access to all cultural activities. The diverse media landscape of the Weimar Republic was transformed into the mouthpiece of propagandistic trend reporting; editorial offices were required to adhere to extensive state instructions. As a party organ of the NSDAP, the daily newspaper Völkischer Beobachter increased its print run from 1931 to 1944 from 120,000 to 1.7 million copies. Well known anti-Semitic and racist Nazi newspapers included Der Stürmer and Der Angriff.

Radio and film enjoyed special support from the state during the dictatorship. The Volksempfänger, which Hitler, Goebbels and other high-ranking party functionaries used to address the German public on a regular basis, was brought to the market from 1933. The nationalisation of film production reached its conclusion in 1942 with the merger of the remaining production companies to form UFA-Film GmbH. In addition to ideological propaganda films, numerous laboriously produced entertainment films were specially commissioned to distract the German people in wartime, such as the cinema hit Münchhausen of 1943, which was shot using pioneering Agfacolor film technology. The use of the television, on the other hand, did not get beyond the experimental stage in the greater Berlin area.