Media quality: "Echo der Zeit" ahead of NZZ
On Monday, the Medienqualität association published its first-ever ranking of the quality of Swiss media: The NZZ, the NZZ am Sonntag, 20minuten.ch, and Radio SRF’s «Echo der Zeit» were awarded a gold «Q.».
The media quality rating is carried out separately for four media groups with a comparable journalistic focus. Radio SRF's news magazine "Echo der Zeit" is not only the clear winner in the comparison group of radio and TV programs. It sets the standard in terms of media quality in Switzerland across all the media titles studied - both in the content analysis and in the audience survey. The program focuses on important events and relevant contexts. It achieved the highest quality score of all 43 titles and programs measured. The quality leaders in the other comparison groups are:
- Neue Zürcher Zeitung in the Daily and Online Newspapers Group
- NZZ am Sonntag in the Sunday Newspapers and Magazines group
- 20minuten.ch in the tabloid and commuter newspaper group
The first-place titles from each of the four groups are awarded the "Golden Q" for their above-average quality. The MQR evaluates the information offered by the media examined according to the criteria of professionalism, classification performance, diversity and relevance. These are indispensable for quality journalism in the context of democratic opinion-forming. To measure reporting quality, more than 18,000 editorial contributions were analyzed and evaluated. More than 1,600 representatively selected people from German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland took part in the online survey on quality perception. The majority of users rated the quality of Swiss information media as good. The respondents gave 8710 media ratings. Of these, 62 percent rated the quality of media titles as "good" to "very good" and 10 percent as "very poor" or "poor". In the survey's calculated quality index, 39 of 43 media titles achieved an average rating above a 3 on the scale of 1 to 5.
Overall, it is striking that the results for reporting quality correlate strongly with the audience's perception of quality. Almost all media titles whose reporting is of high quality in terms of content according to democracy-relevant criteria are also generally rated as high quality by the respondents. The normative understanding of quality on which the content analysis is based is thus supported by the Swiss audience.
With the Media Quality Rating (MQR), the Founders' Association Media Quality Switzerland (MQS) aims to promote media quality in Switzerland and strengthen quality awareness among the media themselves as well as among media users.
In order to ensure an independent and scientific assessment of media quality, the MQS association had entrusted the two university institutes Fög - Research Institute Public and Society of the University of Zurich and the Department of Communication Science and Media Research of the University of Fribourg with the implementation.
