Previous studies show that political violence often influences individual preferences and attitudes on issues like securitization and migration. However, the potential impact of political violence on individuals can only travel through the media. The visibility of social and political actors in public debates after political violence largely depends on media outlets’ ideology and strategy. To gain a better understanding of the media gatekeeping mechanisms that potentially influence and distort individuals' perceptions of political violence, we study how media outlets shape public debates at the intersection of issues of nationalism, Islam, and migration after fatal acts of political violence in Germany (1995-2020). Within this framework, we investigate the emerging issues, frames, and central actors in the public sphere after such events, and how sustained or dynamic their visibility and resonance endure afterwards. We focus on larger periods before and shortly after an event. First, drawing on two mainstream German newspapers, we investigate more narrowly public reactions by social and political actors from core-sentence analysis to understand their agenda-setting dynamics and framing after acts of political violence since 2016. Second, based on seven German newspapers, we use topic models to investigate the effect of acts of political violence on public debates since 1995. Herein, we analyze differences within the newspaper landscape across time to identify outlet-specific trends. Our results have important implications for our understanding of how newspaper media shape public debates after political violence, and which social and political actors gain visibility and can dominate the political agenda more effectively.