Last but not least: What the Fög
Free newspapers are spared nothing: Following the annual criticism of their quality, they now face a ban from the university campus and expulsion from the Fög lecture halls.
You can tell: the wound is deep, the fronts are hardened, the mood is in the cellar. Kurt Imhof and the staff of his Research Institute for the Public Sphere and Society (Fög) are down in the dumps once and for all with the "non-quality" media. As if the punishment in the yearbook on media quality - last year it was too complex, this time too short - wasn't bad enough, Blick am Abend has now uncovered the following scandal: The Fög has banned everything that is not nailed down in terms of quality from its lecture halls. In other words: 20 Minuten and Blick am Abend. The co-director of the institute, Mark Eisenegger, revealed this in an interview with the media magazine Edito. Quote: "We prohibit students from taking commuter newspapers into the lecture and seminar room. 20 Minuten or Blick am Abend do not belong in a university unless they are being analyzed".
Strong tobacco! Correspondingly spicy from the house of Evening view shot back against the "arrogant statement". Even in the rector's office, a ban on free newspapers would be "ridiculous". And the question arises as to how an offense would be punished - flogging, a penal camp or reading the yearbook in question? Editor-in-chief Peter Röthlisberger explains in his commentary: the findings of the "media dictator" Eisenegger are "strangely enough taken seriously outside the professional media scene". A little later, he even allies himself with the Wemf-accredited competition: 779,000 readers take the daily media freedom to read Blick am Abend... "and many more read 20 Minuten". A historic alliance.
In fact, certain scenes in the lecture hall are a little strange. "Student, what are you reading?" "Blick!" "Yeah what... be more precise! Sunday view? Blick? Blick Online? Blick for women? Blick in the evening?". "The normal paid Blick, Professor". "Good luck, carry on!". No wonder the Fög lecturers "fell silent" in the face of such accusations. "Neither Eisenegger nor media quality guru Kurt Imhof" were available for comment, the article triumphantly concludes. Written against the wall, the complainers from Oerlikon.
In order to demonstrate the support of the people, the online a few comments from readers. The plan was probably to make statements along the lines of "first they waste our tax money - without ever having worked properly - and now they want to tell us what we have to read!". For once, there was no great wave of outrage. Instead, most readers wonder why students have to read any newspapers at all during lectures ("A lecture hall is just a lecture hall, it comes from listening!"). That's right. And if you can't do without a newspaper, then you'd rather read free newspapers than quality tomes. Unlike reading the NZZ, you can do the 20-minute crossword puzzle at the same time as the lecture (especially multitasking women who file their nails at the same time).
Thomas Häusermann
