The Press Council is not responsible for private tweets by journalists
The Press Council declined to hear the complaint against a private tweet by a journalist from the BaslerZeitung (BaZ) because it lacks jurisdiction in the matter.
In June 2017, the head of BaZ's federal house editorial department had sent out a tweet in which he claimed that two well-known Swiss politicians supported an action in Berlin in which Holocaust survivors had been shouted down. The two people concerned filed a complaint against BaZ with the Swiss Press Council for violating the duty to tell the truth. They had not known about the action; on the contrary, they were firmly against such actions. Nor were they members of the group protesting in Berlin; they had merely supported an appeal by that group eight years earlier calling for the human rights of Palestinians to be respected.
As a rule, Twitter is not an edited medium, as would be required under the Press Council's rules of procedure for its intervention, writes the Press Council about the case. Also, the Basler Zeitung cannot be responsible for a text that was not edited by it, even if the author of the tweet tweets frequently and does so with the identification as "Journalist@BaslerZeitung".
However, the Press Council is aware that the dissemination of information via Twitter raises fundamental questions regarding its competence. It would therefore like to come back to this.
