Agreements between SRF and regional churches renewed
On Wednesday, March 22, 2017, the three regional churches and Swiss Radio and Television reaffirmed their existing partnership by renewing their agreements for another five years at a joint event in Zurich.
To this end, the existing agreements between SRF on the one hand and the three national churches in Switzerland (Christian Catholic Church, Protestant Reformed Church and Roman Catholic Church) on the other, which have been in force since 2012, were slightly revised.
Both SRF and the churches are committed to public service. The three national churches are close to social and state institutions and make an important contribution to coexistence that enjoys respect and public recognition, even where church and state are separate. The members of the three national churches still make up the largest proportion of the country's religiously oriented population. For these reasons, SRF maintains special relations with these churches, without prejudice to its autonomy and independence. Since 2007, the term "religion" has been explicitly mentioned in the SRG SSR license.
The agreements between SRF and the churches govern their cooperation with regard to Christian programs on radio and television. Specifically, they cover the "Word on Sunday" and its Rhaeto-Romanic edition "In pled sin via", church service broadcasts and radio sermons. The most important change to the agreements concerns live broadcasts of church services, which in future will be mostly convergent, i.e. broadcast simultaneously on both radio and television channels. On the one hand, this will exploit synergies and, on the other, a single church service broadcast will reach a significantly larger audience in this way.
The amendments to the agreements were prepared by the SRF religion department under the direction of Judith Hardegger together with the representatives of the Christian Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformed Churches. SRF Director Ruedi Matter and SRF Head of Culture Stefan Charles as well as Lars Simpson and Maja Weyermann for the Christian Catholic Church, Odilo Noti and Charles Martig for the Catholic Media Center, Christoph Weber-Berg and Pascale Huber for the Reformed Media signed the agreement. The signing marks the continuation of the cooperation between SRF and the national churches.
