Self-knitted realities
What happens when a second tabloid comes onto the market in Switzerland alongside Blick? In any case, there is a growing compulsion to arrange stories as events.
Column What happens when a second tabloid is launched on the Swiss market alongside Blick? In any case, there is a growing compulsion to arrange stories as events, and in Werbewoche (WW 20/04) the expressed or unspoken wishes of the Jean Frey publishing house for a "right-wing" tabloid newspaper were discussed. It is worth asking systematically what means could be used to make such a newspaper plan a success, and the political terms left and right mean little in this debate. Of course, a Schweizer Krone - to take up the title of the large, successful and small-bourgeois political Austrian tabloid - could cover a few topics of the Zeitgespräch differently than Blick. Moritz Leuenberger's CO2 levy, for example, would be a real find. Ringier's Blick does this in the same analytical way that the tax package has already been dealt with: "Who drives better and who drives worse." The Schweizer Krone would run a campaign entitled "The state steals an hour a day from little people", because of course journeys by public transport usually take longer than those by car. That's right: two tabloid media outlets would be up in arms about some topics. But that wouldn't change the world. The important topics in complicated industrial societies are too abstract for emotional communication. There would be a bit more shouting about Samuel Schmid's tank or the cranked or uncranked approach over Zurich. That would be it.
The main problem of the tabloid is the "second world". Emotional communication media must place a world number two alongside the differentiated back and forth about imputed rental value and interest tax agreements and alongside the serious, i.e. boring, personnel from Deiss to Ledergerber: Eros Ramazzotti and his real or fictitious love life, Heiri Müller's blaring music or Boris Becker's daughter conceived in a broom cupboard. Many figures from the second world do not exist in reality: Verona Feldbusch is a pure fictional character. Thomas Borer or Oliver Kahn are real figures who have given themselves over to alienation in the second world or have been forced to do so. The tabloids can't get away with boring reality.
Let's take an example. The German tabloid Bild takes three "metropolitan girls", undresses them, shows them with bare thighs and long boots - and sends them to a farm in Brandenburg. At the same time, three farmer's sons from Brandenburg are sent to a luxury hotel in Berlin. This is an "event". The story, which is told over the course of a week and richly illustrated, did not "really" happen. It is arranged, simply event management. The "second world" is drawn in front of the first like a screen because the first is too "boring". A second tabloid newspaper would trigger a huge push towards the "second world". But is that what we want?
We would have to want it if it was profitable for anyone. But Tito Tettamanti is still silent. You just don't know whether it will pay off. Blick, which has raised its price, could lower it again. Burda's focus has not blown away Spiegel Austs, but forced it to modernize. We work in an interesting industry.
Peter Glotz fears that what really happens will count even less.
The main problem of the tabloid is the "second world". Emotional communication media must place a world number two alongside the differentiated back and forth about imputed rental value and interest tax agreements and alongside the serious, i.e. boring, personnel from Deiss to Ledergerber: Eros Ramazzotti and his real or fictitious love life, Heiri Müller's blaring music or Boris Becker's daughter conceived in a broom cupboard. Many figures from the second world do not exist in reality: Verona Feldbusch is a pure fictional character. Thomas Borer or Oliver Kahn are real figures who have given themselves over to alienation in the second world or have been forced to do so. The tabloids can't get away with boring reality.
Let's take an example. The German tabloid Bild takes three "metropolitan girls", undresses them, shows them with bare thighs and long boots - and sends them to a farm in Brandenburg. At the same time, three farmer's sons from Brandenburg are sent to a luxury hotel in Berlin. This is an "event". The story, which is told over the course of a week and richly illustrated, did not "really" happen. It is arranged, simply event management. The "second world" is drawn in front of the first like a screen because the first is too "boring". A second tabloid newspaper would trigger a huge push towards the "second world". But is that what we want?
We would have to want it if it was profitable for anyone. But Tito Tettamanti is still silent. You just don't know whether it will pay off. Blick, which has raised its price, could lower it again. Burda's focus has not blown away Spiegel Austs, but forced it to modernize. We work in an interesting industry.
Peter Glotz fears that what really happens will count even less.
> Peter Glotz is Professor of Media and Communication Management at the University of St. Gallen and a SonntagsBlick columnist.
