At your own risk

 
René Worni on media products that deserve warnings. 
With the black sheep, the symbol of SVP party politics, the nation is currently receiving a lot of attention in the international press. According to a media review in the NZZ, the German Financial Times writes of a "new wave of xenophobic propaganda". For the Independent, Switzerland is "Europe's heart of darkness", while Der Spiegel reports on the "all-out hacker", referring to Blocher. "We have lots of requests from children who want to cut out the sheep," Newsweek quotes an SVP spokesperson, the saddest sentence one has read in a media outlet for a long time.The party itself made the front page of the New York Times after the preliminary highlight of this election fall, the "hot" Saturday recently in Bern. "10 to 10" took the pulse of some New York passers-by and supplied the good parlors with statements that showed sheer incomprehension.
Who would have thought it: the flagship democracy and cradle of multicultural coexistence is seen by the international media as a country full of xenophobia and racial hatred. Hardly anyone in the country seems to be bothered by this.
On the contrary: local media are seizing the moment. With Blocher-TV, the publisher of Schaffhauser Nachrichten has landed a coup for his Schaffhausen television station. No advertising campaign could have made the station so popular. The publisher of Südostschweiz, who had once got rid of the Bündner Tagblatt from the SVP when he took it over, is also making clever use of the Minister of Justice's brilliance for his Tele Südostschweiz.
In view of the alarming (international) impact that SVP propaganda is currently having, media should be provided with prophylactic warnings. What is common practice in the tobacco industry with warnings on cigarette packets or in the sex industry with barriers to pornography on the internet should also apply to media products with political advertising: Consume at your own risk - the content may be racially discriminatory and xenophobic.
René Worni, Editor