The downward trend endangers the democatie

The media themselves, with a few laudable exceptions like the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, react cautiously, not at all or defensively. Publishers like Pietro Supino travel the world and declare, as recently at the Congress of German Newspaper Publishers in Berlin, that the quality of media offerings has never been as good and diverse as it is today - and his journalists, like Christian Lüscher in his blog in the Tages-Anzeiger, join in this paean against empirical evidence. The same procedure as every year.

However, it is an undeniable fact not only in Switzerland, but also in large parts of the world, that low-cost and free offerings are taking a heavy toll on paid, high-quality news offerings and gradually pushing them out of the market. It is equally undeniable that media concentration in our country has taken on dangerous proportions and that, in addition to the top dogs Tamedia and Ringier, media entrepreneurs who are pursuing clear political goals are now also pushing their way into the market.

Kurt Imhof and his team of researchers are not telling fairy tales. This is borne out not least by the state of international research. Year after year, similar analyses of the decline of journalism reach us from the Pew Center in the United States. In Italy, Gianpietro Mazzoleni has long observed how "pop politics" and "pop media" play into each other's hands: The majority populist media, and not just Berlusconi's, help populist politicians like Berlusconi and Renzi gain popularity - and even those like Grillo, whom they initially hushed up. For Germany, Wolfgang Donsbach has just shown in a brilliant synopsis of recent scientific studies for the Stiftervereinigung der Presse how, on the one hand, media offerings are becoming journalistically "deprofessionalized," i.e., more and more PR, hidden advertising, but also non-commercial shenanigans are displacing the serious information offerings. Combined with the changed media usage behavior of a growing "digitally socialized generation" that only uses professional news sources by chance instead of regularly in order to inform themselves about current events and social processes, the "knowledge of the world" in the population is demonstrably declining more and more. But it is not only political ignorance and political disinterest that are spreading and becoming a danger to democracy. Citizens are also losing the ability to distinguish themselves: They can no longer distinguish between professional journalistic and non-professional media offerings and consequently no longer appreciate this difference. In a representative survey conducted by Donsbach, four out of ten Germans counted press spokespersons, reader reporters and editors of customer magazines as journalists.

And how does public broadcasting come into play? Is it a "discontinued model," as the SRG itself just boldly suggested in the SRF Media Club? Or could more publicly funded journalistic offerings possibly stop the decline after all? At least the staging of this boring and confusing talk show, in which only SRG Director General Roger de Weck shone with concise, TV-like arguments, did not promise any change in this regard. Ultimately, it is the schools - and the quality media themselves - that are called upon. Distinctiveness is generated through education and upbringing, and without it, there will hardly be any demand for high-quality journalism among the public. Not even if this were to be increasingly financed by taxes or fees.

Stephan Russ-Mohl directs the European Journalism Observatory at the University of Lugano.