Press Council reprimands Davos free paper Gipfel Zytig again
The professional duty of truth also applies to satire in the media. The Davos free paper Gipfel Zytig did not adhere to this principle and therefore received a reprimand from the Press Council - and not for the first time.
The Press Council partially approved a complaint against the Davos weekly, it announced Wednesday. It found a violation of the "Declaration of the Duties and Rights of Journalists". The local newspaper had published a joke in October 2014 under the heading "Hitsch Bärenthalers Schnellschüsse", which was based on figures that did not correspond to the facts.
Among other things, the column said that someone had only filled out his tax return truthfully and wrote that he also feeds or maintains "400,000 asylum seekers and finally all the morons in our parliament. The text also published figures about unemployed or imprisoned people that have nothing to do with reality.
Under the guise of satire
The Press Council wrote that under the guise of satire, this text generalized negative value judgments against minorities. It was particularly shocking that false figures had been used for the article. Exaggerations and alienations belonged indeed to the satire. However, the facts on which the satire is based must be correct.
In another case of a text published in September 2014 on the subject of racism, Gipfel Zytig did not violate the rules of professional conduct. Again, this was a joke published by the free newspaper. The Press Council stated that it was debatable whether or not jokes were funny or in bad taste, but that it did not comment on matters of taste.
The "IG offenes Davos" (IG Open Davos) took the matter to the Press Council. This is not the first time that the so-called jokes or satire of the Davos weekly have landed on the table of the Press Council. In 2013, the paper had compared foreigners to wild boars and caught a rebuke. In the same year, the Press Council criticized Gipfel Zytig for a discriminatory round-about way. (SDA)
