Swiss Media Forum: "Welcome to the club of the barked at".

Just like dogs, there are yappers in the media (sounding the alarm, sensing the scandal), calf biters (biting down, avoiding annoying facts) and chain dogs (feeding on indiscretions). Democracy, and especially the Federal Council, must endure this, said Karin Keller-Sutter in her opening speech at the Swiss Media Forum.

Serious media professionals, on the other hand, would be watchdogs who, as the fourth estate, would have to defend trust in the institutions and also in the media themselves. Otherwise, people would lose trust in the media and in the institutions. And then the media would be barked at and labeled as fake news representatives. The Federal Councillor concluded that she had great confidence in the watchdogs. In other words, the serious media representatives, the majority of whom would fulfill their mandate. On the subject of CS's exit, the Federal Councillor briefly explained the procedure. Asked about the role of Finma, Keller-Sutter said, "One must not confuse firefighters and arsonists."

Flaming speech of the Ukrainian ambassador

Afterwards, the Ukrainian ambassador to Switzerland, Iryna Venediktova, gave a blazing speech on the situation in her country. And asked Switzerland not to slacken in its support for Ukraine.

Dmitri Masinski, a young man who introduced himself as an interpreter of the war, then spoke on stage. Half Russian and half Ukrainian, he grew up in Estonia, now lives in London and works in marketing there. In addition to his full-time job, he began translating videos, livestreams and other posts on social media shortly after the war of aggression began, from Ukrainian to English and also from Russian. He spoke both languages, was naturally "pro-Ukraine" himself, and through the translations enabled people to gain information about how the war was going and also about the soldiers. Other media used the material. Donations are also collected for Ukraine, and the money is invested in truck transports that bring relief supplies to Ukraine.

Prof. Thomas Höppner's keynote was a wake-up call to the media not to underestimate the dangers of artificial intelligence: "Time is pressing, generative AI will displace the media and journalists. The new job 'AI journalist' is machines, not humans. ChatGPT grazes the web and writes new texts from it. The error rate is high and sources are missing," Höppner said. The big tech companies would provide the infrastructure and earn from it. Ad sales will also continue to decline because the texts can be found on the net in modified form from ChatGPT and users are increasingly satisfied with ChatGPT news only.

Panel talk on sexism

At the panel discussion on the question of whether media companies have a problem with sexism, Michèle Binswanger, Claudia Blumer and Christian Mensch, moderated by Maria Victoria Haas, discussed the cultural change in media companies following scandals involving bullying, systematic sidelining of women in editorial departments and allegations of sexual harassment.

In a keynote speech, the editor-in-chief of "Bote der Urschweiz" impressively showed how the small publishing house achieved digital transformation with few resources, but with the enthusiasm of its employees. The day was rounded off by two keynotes from the field of AI research.

Day two of the Swiss Media Forum continues on Friday, with topics including the transformation of Swiss Post, the advertiser panel moderated by Anna Kohler and the elephant round of media houses.