Shawi, stick to your odds

 
Column A birthday greeting to the radio pioneer with a request that he should stick to his core competencies in future. By Oliver Classen. 
After German telenovelas and Moritz Leuenberger's psyche, jack-of-all-trades "Roschee" now also analyzes Swiss media criticism - and once again confuses (self-)marketing with journalism.Cobbler, stick to your last: Roger Schawinski considers himself a vox populi and is an avowed Berlin fan. (However, he has always studiously ignored this warning from the German vernacular). In his in-house magazine Persönlich, Mr. Forever Young, who is celebrating his 63rd birthday this week and has been pretending to make radio for adults for several months now, has recently taken stock of Swiss media journalism. The result is a eulogy peppered with anecdotes and personal settlements at the level of reflection of the free press, which he considers to be so "faceless and uninspired" that it is not suitable for media criticism. Which brings us to the first basic misunderstanding: Media journalists do occasionally discuss media content, so they also act as media critics. However, it is far more important for media journalism to see itself as a meta-department in the sense of an internal interface between politics, business and culture and to see its task (as a quasi-fifth) as keeping an eye on and tapping the fingers of the fourth estate in our democracy.
Here in Switzerland, this sophisticated form and function is currently only cultivated by the NZZ. The editor in charge, Rainer Stadler, was recently awarded the Zurich Journalism Prize, and rightly so. Schawinski interprets this gesture as a "swan song to a previously flourishing genre". As proof, he cites the fact that several quality newspapers run daily media pages in the northern canton - knowing full well that the German market is more than twenty times larger, also in terms of serious media journalism. Mind you, this limping comparison does not release Tagi & Co. from their journalistic duty to return from selective, people-oriented media stories (e.g. about Schawi) to continuous and competent media monitoring. In this case, competition not only stimulates self-reflective business, but also brings mutual control and, in the medium term, higher industry standards.
At the end of his elaborate piece, the marathon opinion man then hands out the usual roses and cacti. His bashing of the excellent media page of the Süddeutsche Zeitung is based on equally private motives ("a malicious article by the head of department") as his praise of Kurt W. Zimmermann as the "Swiss standard bearer of the guild". There is no question that Zimmermann was a serious journalist with a killer instinct for good stories, which is rare in this country, until he changed sides. The current advisor's columns in Weltwoche - for which Schawinski himself conducts interviews - are often enjoyable reading, but are about as far removed from relevant media journalism as Roger Köppel is from professional objectivity.
In short: the best, because most credible, media journalism still comes from ordinary journalists - and not from media entrepreneurs and/or their whisperers. Nowhere is the boundary between marketing and journalism as delicate and sacred as in this secret supreme discipline.
It's just a shame that journalism is no longer a profession in which you can grow old gracefully. This is probably one of the reasons why Schawinski (like Zimmermann) switched to entrepreneurship in good time, which he has mastered brilliantly. But please let him stay there and leave it at his Sunday excursions into the old profession. Because admittedly: When the boss personally picks apart this or that politician on Radio 1 on the Lord's Day, I don't switch off either.
Oliver Classen was a media editor before moving to the development policy organization Berne Declaration as press spokesman.