Medial relaxation rooms
It is clear that quality newspapers can only thrive when they are independent. Public funding undermines this independence. A plea against the rampant practice of over-subsidization.
Column Quality newspapers only thrive in independence. Public funding undermines this. A plea against the rampant subsidy-itis: if you're up to your neck in water, you obviously can't think straight. How else can one understand why one of Germany's national daily newspapers, in its financial difficulties, is asking the state government for a million-euro guarantee? The Frankfurter Rundschau of all newspapers, the guardian of political correctness in the red-green milieu, is letting the cabinet of its hated Minister President Roland Koch stuff money into its holey pockets. And many a journalist who is committed to the trade unions and follows the current horror stories about the decline in advertising revenue in their own company is now half-considering whether public-law forms of organization should not also be established for the print sector. If newspapers fail on the market, which is based on the principle of economic competition, despite their journalistic success, then the media public sphere, which is indispensable for democracies, is in danger. So why not support the leading printed media for opinion-forming from the tax pot? when companies are in crisis, in Germany and apparently also in Switzerland, the state has to fix it. Accepting the decision on the markets is considered nefarious by many here. If, for example in Berlin, a halfway reputable newspaper really had to close down, then you could already formulate the culturally critical editorials that would get upset with bitter words about the destruction of political culture by the profit calculations of soulless managers.
These old popular tunes don't get any better by being whistled over and over again. Everyone knows that good newspapers only existed and still exist if they are run by private companies with the greatest possible independence from the state. Loans, even guarantees and even more so subsidies from public funds undermine this independence. This freedom cannot be separated from the risk of failure. As a rule, there are clearly identifiable reasons for this failure: Errors in management, failure to adapt editorial offerings to changing reception habits and interests or inability to innovatively tap into new markets. None of these are reasons to call for state aid. If there are no publishers willing to invest and no readers willing to buy a newspaper, then it should not be kept alive artificially.
This is also true because the model of public service broadcasting shows what happens when an entire sector of the media system is decoupled from market influences: a cumbersome apparatus, an inscrutable land grab by political parties and interest groups in the committees and the development of a journalistic milieu that above all considers its own certainties to be fit for broadcasting. Just compare, for example, the clattering rhetoric about program quality that can be heard in Germany on the occasion of the new and outrageous demand for a fee increase with the ARD and ZDF coverage of the Iraq war: there was hardly any other commercial channel with so much disinformation. And as far as efficiency is concerned, the disproportion between the number of foreign correspondents and their program output is grotesque. The winds of change do not blow through this warming room of a medium financed by secure fees. We certainly don't need any more of these media quiet rooms.
Heribert Seifert is media and culture correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
These old popular tunes don't get any better by being whistled over and over again. Everyone knows that good newspapers only existed and still exist if they are run by private companies with the greatest possible independence from the state. Loans, even guarantees and even more so subsidies from public funds undermine this independence. This freedom cannot be separated from the risk of failure. As a rule, there are clearly identifiable reasons for this failure: Errors in management, failure to adapt editorial offerings to changing reception habits and interests or inability to innovatively tap into new markets. None of these are reasons to call for state aid. If there are no publishers willing to invest and no readers willing to buy a newspaper, then it should not be kept alive artificially.
This is also true because the model of public service broadcasting shows what happens when an entire sector of the media system is decoupled from market influences: a cumbersome apparatus, an inscrutable land grab by political parties and interest groups in the committees and the development of a journalistic milieu that above all considers its own certainties to be fit for broadcasting. Just compare, for example, the clattering rhetoric about program quality that can be heard in Germany on the occasion of the new and outrageous demand for a fee increase with the ARD and ZDF coverage of the Iraq war: there was hardly any other commercial channel with so much disinformation. And as far as efficiency is concerned, the disproportion between the number of foreign correspondents and their program output is grotesque. The winds of change do not blow through this warming room of a medium financed by secure fees. We certainly don't need any more of these media quiet rooms.
Heribert Seifert is media and culture correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
