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Following normative theories of democracy, voting decisions should be based on voters’ knowledge about parties’ future plans. Actually, most voters do not read party programmes but rather get informed by the mass media. This raises the question of whether mass media contain enough facts about party programmes to provide voters with the information they need in order to make rationally-based voting decisions. To answer this question, an input-output-analysis including the party programmes of the five major parties in the 2005 campaign and the news reports about these programmes in four newspapers was carried out. It shows that newspapers presented party goals insufficiently. This was due to parties’ communication strategies as well as the media’s news selection. Causes and consequences of these findings are discussed.