Economic pressure on the media is taking on ever more subtle, i.e. cross-media formsBy Christian Mensch * The sledgehammer is hardly ever used to discipline critical journalists anymore. The advertising industry has now developed more sophisticated ways of keeping a tight rein on newspapers and magazines. At least that's what a look at the chronology of commercial attempts to put pressure on the media shows - written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Swiss Press Council.
On behalf of Swiss journalism, we would like to thank Walter Frey. Namely Walter Frey. The car importer, large garage owner and former SVP National Councillor from Zurich, together with a few comrades-in-arms, launched the famous advertising boycott against the Tages-Anzeiger in 1979.
In contrast to his colleagues, who were busy placing advertisements in the Zurich daily newspaper again after just weeks or months at the latest, Frey maintained the measure for twenty years. This boycott has earned the Swiss media in general and the Tages-Anzeiger in particular the reputation of being a stronghold of incorruptible, unbending journalism.
His investment of millions - the sanction was not free - helped the Tages-Anzeiger to gain more prestige and the journalists greater self-confidence than they could have achieved with a lot of research. The advertising boycott gave the paper a reputation throughout Switzerland as a newspaper critical of the economy.
Are business and the media in the balance of power today?
But where are the boycotters today? Do they no longer exist because the economy has capitulated to the journalistic power of the media and boycotts are therefore no longer possible? Or do they no longer exist because the media have capitulated to the power of the economy and boycotts are therefore no longer necessary?
A look at the well-known boycott cases from Swiss press history can help. The most famous of these, Autoimporteure versus Tages-Anzeiger, was triggered by a report in the Tages-Anzeiger magazine in March 1979: "Die Autolobby Schweiz", researched and written by Paul Romann and Beat Schweingruber. The report was, according to the language used at the time by the people it criticized, "the straw that broke the camel's back". In other words: The Tagi, ideologically in the green fast lane at the time, had been warned several times.
In September 1980, Globus imposed advertising sanctions. Here, too, the Tages-Anzeiger was hit. The management of the department store wrote that it had "inadequately fulfilled its responsibility to the public through unbalanced and distorted reporting on the youth riots", which is why "advertising orders were cut to a considerable extent".
In 1994, Denner boss Karl Schweri, who has since passed away, withdrew advertisements from all Ringier titles because the discounter felt it had been unfairly criticized in Cash. It was not his first, not his only, but his most famous sanctions campaign, which was severely reprimanded by the Press Council.
There are other, less notorious boycotts and boycotters to mention:
- In 1985, the Geneva real estate industry collectively punished the Tribune de Genève for its reporting on the activities of real estate sharks.
- In 1987, Migros responded to a commentary in Eastern Switzerland by withdrawing an advertisement. The newspaper, which had since merged with the St.Galler Tagblatt, dared to poke fun at the Säntis shopping center.
- In 1992, the Bankverein cut the Ticino newspaper La Regione because it had traced the links between the Swiss banks and the Italian bribery scandals.
Transparency? Ah, all theory is gray...
And today? A guideline issued by the Press Council explicitly calls for boycotts to be made public. This means of exerting pressure is unjustified "if the publication of information is in the public interest". The fact is, however, that no major boycotts have come to light recently. Which really only allows two conclusions to be drawn: Either boycotts no longer exist as a punishment for unpopular information "of public interest", or the aforementioned directive is merely a toothless paper tiger. The latter is probably more accurate. Because they do still exist, illegitimate attempts to exert pressure in the form of boycott threats or veritable boycotts.
The automotive industry in particular, which is lured and coddled by the media like no other with customer-friendly advertising environments - known as automotive journalism - continues to show tendencies towards demonstrations of power vis-à-vis the press. A few years ago, for example, Jean Frey AG fell victim to the Erb Group.
The reason for this was an article in the Beobachter, which had nothing to do with the car industry. However, it took a lot of anti-chamfering and a six-figure indulgence in the form of Freespace before the group of companies reappeared as an advertising client. Ringier works prophylactically in this respect: every year, Switzerland's largest media group invests 500,000 francs in the goodwill of the motorized industry. Ringier invests this much in its television program "Motorshow", which is hosted by Presse-TV and broadcast on SF 2.
"Warning shots" across the bow of press freedom
But even big banks are not free from small-minded aversions. Two years ago, for example, a critical article about UBS boss Marcel Ospel could lead to one or two advertising placements being canceled at short notice. And critical reporting on former CS boss Lukas Mühlemann brought CS advertising to a halt in individual publications - as was easy to observe at the beginning of the year.
"Warning shots" is the term used by financial institutions to describe such short-notice cancelations. In the meantime, the state-owned companies Swiss Post and Swisscom have also exhibited the same behavior. According to research, they have also been reluctant to advertise simply because they felt they were being pilloried a little too often in a newspaper.
The only problem is that neither the newspapers concerned nor the advertisers publicize such cases. And we already have a definition problem. When is a boycott a boycott? Practically never under competition law. Not even the 1979 boycott of car importers was legally a boycott, as the Cartel Commission of the time stated. In its 1981 report, which today reads like a satire of press law, it says: "The Cartel Commission confines itself to stating that, from a purely economic point of view, the withdrawal of advertisements by car importers does not appear justified, but could at best be justified by proving that the editorial stance of the Tages-Anzeiger destroys or significantly reduces the advertising success of new car advertisements." - However, the commission neither provided nor denied proof of whether the editorial stance influenced the advertising impact of an advertisement. Deliberately, insiders said at the time.
Absurd argumentation of car importers
The automotive industry had argued very differently in the cartel hearings. The CEO of Amag, for example, claimed that purely commercial reasons had been the deciding factor in stopping the advertisements. Internal investigations had shown that the level of attention paid to the advertisements in the Tages-Anzeiger had been low "because the newspaper is very extensive" (!). Walter Frey, on the other hand, said frankly and freely that the Tagi was "no longer suitable for car advertisements" because of its political stance. However, he did not want to know anything about a concerted industry action, i.e. a cartel agreement.
Renault was one of the companies that was long believed not to have supported the boycott. However, it then emerged before the Cartel Commission that the French car manufacturers had already stopped advertising in the Tages-Anzeiger. The "negative image of the automobile was the decisive factor". In short: only Walter Frey
openly acknowledged its attempt at economic policy discipline. Renault did not disclose its actions; Amag cited non-political reasons. However, they all referred to the general freedom of trade and commerce, which also includes the freedom to advertise where and when one sees fit without justification.
Political and other rope teams
The reference to freedom of advertising was an embarrassing argument to avoid having to publicly justify the political motives. But not only that. It is a mistake to believe that advertising clients otherwise adhere strictly to objective criteria such as circulation, readership, affinity of the target audience, costs per thousand readers and more when planning media. The not insignificant degree of arbitrariness as to where and when an ad is placed can work to the disadvantage or even to the advantage of a medium. Sometimes personal relationships are the deciding factor, sometimes political expediency.
I'm not revealing a secret when I say that Christoph Blocher features in every issue of Weltwoche with a crossword puzzle. He doesn't do this because he thinks it will boost sales of his Ems-Chemie. He is taking advantage of his advertising freedom to pay his dues for an independent publishing house, Jean Frey, far from any economic logic. Does this jeopardize journalistic independence?
But the initial question was: When is a boycott a boycott? To avoid getting tangled up in the legal thicket between freedom of trade and cartel agreements, we prefer to stick to a simple rule of thumb: a boycott is deemed to have taken place if an advertiser explicitly states legitimate journalistic content covered by freedom of expression as the reason why it is no longer placing advertisements.
Ringier got off lightly
So what about the Borer versus Ringier case? Ringier's management repeatedly claimed that only one advertiser had canceled its orders with specific reference to the Borer story, which in its opinion was indefensible. Although the case was publicized, there was no outcry from the Press Council. Why not?
In the spring and summer of this year, however, completely different tones were heard from Ringier publishing circles: Every second advertising customer had held back on advertising orders with reference to the Borer story.
So what is true? I maintain the following: There was certainly more than one advertiser who removed Ringier from its order list because of the Borer story. But they didn't commit to the boycott. Those who acted as boycotters towards Ringier's lower echelons were probably faced with a completely different problem: they simply had no budget to manage. They believed it was better to strike a pose of power against Ringier than to admit that they simply had no advertisements to manage.
Which brings us to another point: The big bluff. It is part of the communication ritual between the advertising industry and the media that advertisers demand a favorable editorial environment. The announcement - or more precisely: the threat - of switching to a competing medium that supposedly offers a better environment is part of this game.
It is true that this results in an atmosphere of intimidation, especially for smaller media. As interviews for research purposes have shown, regional newspapers often feel they have to cover the opening of a Migros or Coop branch, a new garage or a restaurant. For example, they report when a major distributor installs a new bread counter. Not because it is newsworthy, but because the editors are convinced that they would otherwise upset an important advertising customer and jeopardize significant advertising volumes.
In my opinion, the risk of actually losing ads is far lower than journalists believe or are led to believe. This diffuse fear suits some publishers. They prefer to have a journalistically lean text in the paper, but don't have to engage in time-consuming discussions with advertisers. This is because they often can't understand why the new butcher's display case and the new vegetable stand were worth an article, but their bread counter is ignored.
Publicity helps against threats
In my journalistic career, around ten years ago, when I was still working for the trade press, I was once confronted with a specific threat of a boycott. The director of Publicitas Lugano threatened to withdraw my advertisements. I asked him whether he would be happy for me to firstly inform the management in Lausanne and secondly to inform the public that Publicitas, which, as we know, lives from placing advertisements, was toying with a boycott? The threat was immediately taken off the table with the counter-threat.
The Press Council's requirement that boycotts should be made public should therefore be upheld at all costs: In fact, it is very rarely complied with, but it is an excellent argument to counter a boycott threat with something of equal value. Because it is important to know: Very few would-be boycotters can actually afford a boycott. This is because a genuine boycott has a double cost: it has a political and an economic price.
The call "Don't advertise in this paper!" is politically highly incorrect and can only be made in those rare cases where there is clear moral legitimacy, i.e. where a medium has unambiguously violated moral sensibilities. Even the Borer case was not clear enough: the company that Ringier boycotted was not named. The risk of consumers showing solidarity with a boycotted medium and starting to boycott the boycotter is too great. The moralization of the economy, which media sociologist Kurt Imhof likes to deplore, is a protective shield for the media.
Consensus at all levels
To be honest, however, it must be said that even editors-in-chief are generally against publishing boycott threats. Medard Meier, editor-in-chief of Bilanz, for example, is convinced that a public debate would only harden the fronts and that a consensus solution would resolve the deadlock much more quickly.
Nobody knows what such solutions usually look like - and a few scandals would probably come to light if we knew exactly what deals editorial and publishing directors are prepared to make. Just take a look at how often an extremely critical business article is followed, after a short waiting period, by a proper interview with the big boss of the company in the crosshairs, often conducted by the editor-in-chief himself.
The case of the car importers is still exemplary today for the interplay between the media and the economy. Two conditions had to be met for the boycott to take on the significance that we appreciate today.
Firstly, the automobile was at the center of an ideological battle at the time. This was worth taking financial risks for both sides. The fact that both Frey and Co. as well as the Tages-Anzeiger editorial team, representing the awakening eco-movement, saw themselves as politically in the right made it possible for the boycott to become a campaign and thus public. There had previously been heated internal discussions at the Tages-Anzeiger, according to its then editor-in-chief and current President of the Press Council, Peter Studer. In the end, however, Studer's predecessor Walter Stutzer, the previously informed head of journalism in the management, covered up the article and the publicizing of the avalanche it triggered.
The automotive industry: midwife and gravedigger
Secondly, the financial risks were manageable for both sides. "We can easily cope with these few million francs", Walter Stutzer, a member of the management board at the time, is reported to have said, much to the displeasure of the advertisers. It is no coincidence that Walter Frey, of all people, held out the longest against the boycott: he was the main shareholder of the free newspaper Züri Woche, in which he had a reasonably acceptable advertising alternative - and which he had to support with advertisements anyway. When Züri Woche ceased to exist, Frey also quickly grew tired of the boycott. Paying a political and economic price was too expensive even for him.
Incidentally, something similar happened in Basel. For whatever reason, the free newspaper Doppelstab from the Basler Zeitung was suspected of being an anti-car paper. As a result, the car industry felt homeless on the Rhine bend.
Journalist Beat Alder's new free newspaper Basler Bebbi stepped into the breach and ensured its survival for a few years. A new double-bar editorial team later corrected the course, served the exhaust industry and thus ensured that the Basler Bebbi disappeared from the scene again in the medium term.
Let's take Denner again as an example. Karl Schweri, the owner of the company, was personally at the helm. And he willfully robbed himself of the best advertising platforms. Every employed manager, every media planner would have been fired at the drop of a hat for squandering company assets if they had adopted the patriarch's nonsensical advertising strategies.
Schweri notoriously boycotted not only Ringier. In another case, he withdrew a multi-million euro print order from the Tages-Anzeiger - simply because of a harmlessly ironic column about Schweri the politician. And there were times when he believed he could do almost entirely without the press as an advertising medium. At that time, he only advertised in the left-wing AZ newspapers and placed radio spots - with the positive effect of having delayed the death of the left-wing press for some time.
Swiss CEO Dosé sets a bad example
However, there are certainly situations in which boycott measures can be implemented without suffering any damage. In spring 2002, Swiss CEO André Dosé carried out such a variant against Facts. Because he disliked its critical reporting, he ordered that the news magazine should no longer be distributed on board Swiss aircraft in future. Instead, Focus and in some cases Weltwoche will now be handed out. The NZZ am Sonntag made the boycott public in April. Swiss CEO Dosé could be satisfied with the report: his inglorious role in the implementation of the punitive economic measures was formulated with particular caution and his behaviour was even legitimized to a certain extent due to the "poorly differentiated negative campaign against Swiss".
The loss of circulation of 7 to 8,000 copies is serious for a medium with around 100,000 copies. The publishing director of Facts is now consoling himself with the fact that, firstly, reading usage on airplanes is low anyway and, secondly, is hardly recorded by media research. This means that with a lower circulation, Facts can expect higher usage per issue. Incidentally, Dosé is a copycat: Lufthansa, which threw the Süddeutsche Zeitung overboard last year, provided the model from more recent times.
Compliant journalists, fearful management
But what can we learn from this? First of all: media diversity brings diversity of opinion. But it also brings a diversity of advertising opportunities - and this is
a key prerequisite for economic pressure measures to be effective at all. Against this background, it becomes understandable why the economy is calling loudly for a commercial television landscape in Switzerland: Alternative advertising channels give it more room for maneuver in the traditional print country of Switzerland.
In the upcoming parliamentary debate on the revision of the Radio and Television Act, business representatives will therefore be heard singing the praises of the free market economy, but are now suddenly advocating fee splitting for commercial television stations.
Nevertheless, I believe that today's media are more resistant to pressure from the business world than they used to be. Even the much lamented fall of the wall between editorial and publishing departments turns out to be a chimera on closer inspection. It is true that the editorial and advertising departments used to be rather hostile to each other. J. Pepe Wyss, who now works for the NZZ Group, once described the situation at the Tages-Anzeiger in the 1980s as follows: "The advertisement canvassers found the editors snooty and
unapproachable; the majority of communication was in writing." The Press Council's guideline that "the separation between the editorial and advertising sections must be upheld under all circumstances" seemed to have been fulfilled to the letter.
It seemed so, because the Tages-Anzeiger editorial team itself submitted texts to the management that were considered problematic at the time. Journalist Elisabeth Michel-Alder described the situation in 1981 as follows: "There were individual instructions such as deletion regulations from the management for an article that polemicized against smoking, even though not a single cigarette advertisement was registered in the issue in question."
Or: "In mid-September 1980, the writer Reto Hänny provided the magazine editors with an account of his experiences during days spent in police custody in Zurich. Because it dealt with the difficult subject of youth unrest, the text was brought to the attention of the editors-in-chief in good time. The editors-in-chief decided by a majority, but not unanimously, in favor of publication and submitted the report to the management. However, the latter was against
which the editors-in-chief regretted but found justifiable."
We would still consider such conditions scandalous today. Apart from a few exceptions, publishers today respect the personal responsibility of editors. Nevertheless, the commercialization of the media industry has also led to increasingly sophisticated strategies being developed to better meet the needs not only of consumers, but also of advertisers. Today, all important sectors are provided with special editorial services.
This not only applies to car dealers or the tourism industry, which has bought the right to uncritical service reports with paid journalist trips. In the popular press, the IT and home electronics industry, the fashion and luxury sector and the restaurant scene are also regularly courted with a favorable editorial environment.
The Press Council's Guideline 8.1 requires that the independence of journalists from economic actors must be guaranteed. At the same time, however, it distinguishes between "individual and exclusive benefits to journalists", which should be rejected, and "benefits to entire groups of journalists", which are acceptable. And thus sanctions the creation of text environments with an affinity for advertising that systematically undermine the principle of editorial independence.
The NZZ impressively demonstrates how reflexively the economy reacts to journalistic bait-and-switch offers. The banking, insurance and asset management supplements that this prestigious newspaper publishes every year can hardly be surpassed in terms of unkindness and are simply unpalatable for consumers. They are - let's be honest - an imposition in terms of content and aesthetics. But they are always crammed full of advertisements - the system works, the advertising industry feels it is being taken seriously.
Cross-media boundaries are being dissolved today
The greatest threat to editorial independence, however, is posed by the increasing interdependence between the media industry and traditional advertising clients. Take the example of Ringier and Coop. The two large corporations operate a joint communications vehicle, the well-established Betty Bossi brand. Originally an invention of Unilever, Betty Bossi is on the one hand a cooking magazine, but also regularly appears editorially in Ringier magazines.
On the other hand, Betty Bossi is a sales organization for cooking utensils and cookbooks. And Betty Bossi acts as a promotional vehicle for Coop foods used in the recipes. In short, Betty Bossi is a model for the future; Coop is Ringier's partner in Switzerland; in China, food giant Nestlé will be Ringier's partner...
But back to Switzerland: Ringier and Coop are exploiting Betty Bossi in multimedia. Coop is present on television with a daily cooking studio marked as advertising and sponsors the program "Al Dente", which is produced by Ringier as part of Press TV and broadcast on SF 2. Coop is also one of the largest clients for customer printing with the Coop newspaper. Ringier was only recently able to secure a tranche of this. We will be watching with interest to see where and how this collaboration is further strengthened.
From the point of view of pure journalistic doctrine, such links are untenable, even alarming. Especially because instead of Ringier, one could have taken a number of other media companies that are beginning to systematically and sustainably dissolve the separation between journalistic and commercial communication under the pretext of "cross-media".
To be continued...
* Christian Mensch is media editor of Weltwoche and previously held the same position at WerbeWoche. He gave this presentation at the anniversary congress of the Swiss Press Council, where he also spoke about the situation in Ticino and French-speaking Switzerland (www.presserat.ch/15700.htm). In the next issue of WerbeWoche, three advertising managers will discuss their experiences and assessments of this controversial topic (ww).
