Panel Discussion: "Quality in the Media - Can It Be Controlled and Financed?"
The new parliamentary group on Media and Communication (GMK), co-founded by Filippo Lombardi (CVP, TI), President of Swiss Advertising (SW) and a member of the Executive Board of Swiss Media, met for the first time in mid-March for a panel discussion in Bern. The discussion focused on the issue of quality in the media.
In his welcome address, Lombardi made it clear that the GMK was not a group for or against SRG. Rather, he said, there was too little discussion in politics about media or even commercial communication, and that was something they wanted to change. Under the chairmanship of Filippo Leutenegger, publisher and member of the National Council (FDP, ZH), Kurt Imhof (Professor at the University of Zurich), Matthias Ramsauer (Vice Director of the Federal Office of Communications Bakom), Jürg Bachmann (President of the Association of Swiss Private Radio Stations) and Marc Friedli (Managing Director of Tele M1) then discussed the quality of the media and their financial viability. The discussion was based on two studies, on the one hand Imhof's study "Quality of the media"which is harshly critical of the Swiss media, on the other hand, the evaluation of Switzerland's licensed electronic media by the Bakom.
"And they didn't give each other anything, the participants in the discussion," commented Urs Schnider, communications officer at SW. Marc Friedli questioned the quality of the study: with this study set-up, Friedli said, any private TV station, which does completely without its own services, could have become the primus of this study, that couldn't be. "The study has damaged our product," said the managing director of Tele M1. And with the ratings that Tele M1 is showing, one can't be completely wrong with the program. Imhof then denounced the "rating fetishism": It was wrong to use only the ratings as a criterion for quality, he said. Tele Zueri and Tele M1 are the spearhead of trash - and their news programs are "pure trash," Imhof said ungraciously.
The exchange of views took place in front of around 35 guests, parliamentarians from various parties and some publishers. One topic was also fee-splitting (RTVG). Jürg Bachmann finally offered a possible approach to ending the (blame) discussion: The problem was not quality, but the definition of quality. Here, the inspected and the inspectors would have to sit down together and work out criteria that would be checked with a watertight methodology.
Self-cannibalization and quality decall
(Guest commentary by Stephan Russ-Mohl, head of the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano, on the "Quality of the Media" yearbook).
