Press Council rejects complaint against Woz
The case made headlines about a year ago: The weekly newspaper Woz had spied on the head of the Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) for a special edition. The NDB filed a complaint with the Press Council over the matter—but was rebuffed.
The NDB's complaint was rejected, the press council announced on Saturday. The undercover research was permissible in this case because the experiment - as the journalists themselves called it - would not have been feasible without it. The public interest was also given. The journalists had followed NDB chief Markus Seiler in a car on his way to work, among other things. The goal of the research had been to "know what you can find out about a person without letting him know that you want to find out something about him," as the Woz wrote at the time.
Covert search permissible
NDB communications chief Felix Endrich then filed a complaint with the Swiss Press Council. The FIS criticized, among other things, that the journalists had not posed as such and had thus concealed their profession. However, the Press Council considers the undercover research in this case to be permissible. There is undoubtedly a public interest in finding out how easily people - and thus also the head of the FIS - can be observed, according to the decision of the Press Council. Because the journalists were only able to obtain this information by means of undercover research, there is no infringement of the "Declaration of the Duties and Rights of Journalists" according to the Press Council.
Seiler website "no assembly
The NDB had also complained about the website that Woz had put online in Seiler's name. It contained texts, photos and videos about Seiler. The NDB criticized that the website could be described as a montage, but was not marked as such. The Press Council also rejected this part of the complaint: the website was not a montage, it simply illustrated the journalists' experiment. With the linking of the website to the "WOZ" article, it was clear from the outset that the question was how much could be found out about the head of the secret service. (SDA)
