Publishers demand a ban on advertising for SRG
In the debate over public service broadcasting, publishers are calling for a ban on advertising on Swiss radio and television. They argue that the British model—which allocates license fees to radio and television and advertising revenue to private publishers—is worth emulating.
The SRG should concentrate fully on a narrower program with fewer channels. It should withdraw from the battle for larger advertising shares with private broadcasters, said publisher president Hanspeter Lebrument on Tuesday at the Epiphany Conference of the Swiss Media Association in Zurich.
Content restrictions
An alternative to an advertising ban would be content restrictions for SRG on the internet. The fact that SRG produces a fully-fledged news portal and state-of-the-art apps (for news and weather) and offers them free of charge is harmful. Fortunately, SRG is not allowed to sell online advertising, although it is constantly trying to circumvent this ban. By offering an excessive amount of text on the internet, it is harming private publishers. SRG promotes the free mentality on the Internet. This makes it harder for publishers to find demand for their paid content.
Indirect funding must remain
The debate on the public service makes sense if the framework conditions for the private media are improved without households having to dig deeper into their pockets and the principle of indirect press subsidies (via a reduction in postal taxes) is maintained, continued Lebrument. Against the backdrop of years of aggressive attacks by the SRG against the private media, the publishers were in favor of an in-depth parliamentary and media policy debate on the public service. Newspapers should neither be weakened nor sacrificed because of an increasingly expensive public service for the SRG.
Constitutional reform called for
The fact that the debate surrounding the public service is currently raging is also due to the fact that the constitution does not adequately cover the new media. In an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on Tuesday (today), Urs Saxer, Professor of International Law, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law and Media Law, points out that a constitutional reform is necessary in order to adequately meet the media policy challenges. (SDA)
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