Chapter 9 Switzerland Highly concentrated leading news media in austerity and downsizing mode Heinz Bonfadelli & Werner A. Meier, in collaboration with Michael Schanne Introduction Switzerland, a small, landlocked country in the centre of Europe, enjoys a remarkably long and continuous tradition of independence, stability, and political neutrality. In early 2020, the Switzerland’s population was 8.6 mil- lion residents, about 25 per cent of which were foreigners. Consequently, one key characteristic of this country is its cultural diversity. There are four official languages – German (primary spoken language of 62% of the population in 2018), French (23%), Italian (8%), and Rhaeto-Romanic (0.5%), which more or less also define the land’s four different cultural mentalities. Therefore, issues related to the integration of a big and heterogeneous group of immigrants, and new refugees, often become a controversial topic in the politics of the country. Politically, Switzerland is considered a semi-direct democracy with strong fed- eralism in addition to a high degree of autonomy in its 26 cantons and nearly 2,200 communities. Freedom in the World 2021: status “free” (Score: 96/100, stable since 2017). In 2020, Switzerland ranked 12th among 210 countries for its political rights and civil liberties (Freedom House, 2021). Liberal Democracy Index 2020: Switzerland is placed in the Top 10% bracket – rank 5 of measured countries (Varieties of Democracy Institute, 2021). Freedom of Expression Index 2018: rank 1 of measured countries, up from 4 in 2016 (Varieties of Democracy Institute, 2017, 2019). 2020 World Press Freedom Index: rank 8 of 180 countries, down from 6 in 2019 (Reporters Without Borders, 2020). Bonfadelli, H., Meier, W. A., & Schanne, M. (2021). Switzerland: Highly concentrated leading news media in austerity and downsizing mode. In J. Trappel, & T. Tomaz (Eds.), The Media for Democracy Monitor 2021: How leading news media survive digital transformation (Vol. 1) (pp. 381–454). 381 Nordicom, University of Gothenburg. https://doi.org/10.48335/9789188855404-9 HEINZ BONFADELLI & WERNER A. MEIER, IN COLLABORATION WITH MICHAEL SCHANNE The diversified structure of the Swiss society, with its high obligation for civic engagement, has been an important precondition for its differentiated media landscape (Bonfadelli, 2010; Künzler, 2013; Studer et al., 2014; Meier, 2016). It is shaped, on the one hand, by the Swiss Public Broadcasting Corpora- tion SRG SSR, with its radio and television programmes in each of the three language regions (SRG SSR, 2020a) and, on the other, by a regionally based press, dominated by the three biggest publishing houses, the TX Group (former Tamedia AG), the NZZ Mediengruppe, and the newly created CH Media, a joint venture started in 2018 based on a partnership between AZ Medien and NZZ-Regionalmedien with head offices in Aarau. Meanwhile, the private commercial radio and television stations in the country are quite weak and mostly owned by the dominant publishing houses. Interestingly, there was also a merger in 2018, in the background, of Swiss news agency Keystone-SDA – a corporation with stocks by the Swiss media – and the Austrian Press Agency APA, which resulted in 40 job cuts across 150 full-time positions. The Federal Constitution (FC) of the Swiss Confederation’s Article 16 guarantees “freedom of opinion and information”, namely of the media. Fur- thermore, the Constitution prohibits censorship and also guarantees editorial secrecy. Freedom of the press, the ability to gather and publish information and express opinions freely, is traditionally interpreted in Switzerland as protecting the right to establish newspapers or other such media outlets. The independ- ence of the Public Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR is specifically underlined in the RTVG, the Swiss Radio and Television Act. Swiss television and radio stations have the mandate to reflect and maintain the linguistic and cultural diversity of the country by providing specific programming. Switzerland’s media policy is governed by several national and regional institutions along with other stakeholders, who influence the norms and values of the Swiss media landscape. The Federal Council, the Swiss Parliament, the Federal Department of the Environment, Transportation, Energy and Com- munication (DETEC), the Federal Office of Communications (OFCOM), and the Independent Complaints Authority for Radio and Television (ICA), play a crucial role in media governance together with political parties, media organisations, and inter-trade organisations like Verband Schweizer Medien [Swiss Media Association] (VSM), who also have a say in governmental media policy strategies. Therefore, the nation’s media political debate in the past 20 years has been strongly influenced by questions of press concentration and the future financing of the press, including indirect subsidies for distribution, direct subsidies, and financing, together with cost savings of the Public Broadcasting Corporation SRG SSR. 382 ~ SWITZERLAND ~ HIGHLY CONCENTRATED LEADING NEWS MEDIA IN AUSTERITY AND DOWNSIZING MODE Covid-19 Switzerland, like all other European countries, was hit by the Covid-19 pan- demic in the spring of 2020. As a result, the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) quickly launched a large-scale information campaign. For example, through posters and advertisements, as well as online information in more than one dozen languages, strict social distancing rules were implemented. Mean- while, it was only in August that wearing masks in public transportation was made compulsory for everyone. However, there were still no stringent rules for wearing masks while shopping in stores. As a result, from the start of the pan- demic until mid-August 2020, Switzerland remained affected by the Covid-19 crisis with around 38,500 infections and around 1,720 deaths. The effects of Covid-19 were not only limited to patients, but also traders, shopkeepers, and the media industry. The media industry was severely impacted by newspaper bans in restaurants and loss of advertising. The Federal Council, therefore, formulated an emergency package for the media amounting to CHF 30 million by the end of May 2020. From the beginning, Swiss federal spokesperson and FOPH official Daniel Koch updated the public about the Covid-19 situation almost daily, always in the main news of the public broadcasting corporation SRG SSR. And probably analogous to the rest of Europe, the Covid-19 crisis largely dominated media coverage, prompting an increase in the public’s use of news (Mediapulse, 2020). In addition, early on in April 2020 (see Russ-Mohl, 2020), communication scientists in Switzerland like Stephan Russ-Mohl, Vinzenz Wyss, or Otfried Jarren were reasonably critical about the quality of media coverage. Among other things, questions were raised on the lack of transparent reporting, media’s handling of figures, the focus on dramatic individual cases and fearmongering, and virologists as infallible media stars. By the end of July, the first systematic content analysis of 22 leading news media from German- and French-speaking Switzerland in the period from 1 January 2020 to 30 April 2020, based on a representative sample of 1,448 articles from 28,695 articles on the Covid-19 topic, was published by the fög – Forschungszentrum Öffentlichkeit und Gesellschaft [Research Center for the Public Sphere and Society] at the University of Zurich. This concluded that performance of the Swiss media during the pandemic tended to be positive. There was diversity in topics discussed, and expert views were represented; however, dominance of men was observed. While the relevance of reporting was relatively high, a low level of thematic integration was a key shortcoming. Despite critical discussions about the government and authorities as well as a distance of the media from the measures prescribed by the authorities was observed, in some ways the media appeared to have behaved relatively uncriti- cally, especially in the sensitive phase before the shutdown – in the opinion 383 HEINZ BONFADELLI & WERNER A. MEIER, IN COLLABORATION WITH MICHAEL SCHANNE of the fög – and possible developments were not contextualised enough. In addition, a problematic handling of figures and statistics was revealed, which had already been criticised by Klaus Meier and Vinzenz Wyss. These general findings on media performance differed by media type, with public broadcast- ing performing particularly well. Tabloid and commuter newspapers, on the other hand, were less diverse in their reporting, according to the fög’s analysis, which revealed their tendency to convey bare numbers without classification and largely with an alarmist-dramatising stance in reporting. From the perspective of media users, Mediapulse AG, which measures usage of television and radio in Switzerland, pointed out in a press release at the beginning of April 2020 that in the first two weeks of shutdown, significantly more people watched television, especially during prime time, and also for longer. Thomas Friemel from the IKMZ – Institute for Communication Science and Media Research at the University of Zurich, and his team, conducted a representative survey of around 1,000 people on information and communica- tion behaviour during the Covid-19 crisis from 19–24 March 2020. Accord- ing to their findings, the German-Swiss population attributed great relevance to the information both from the Federal Council and the FOPH, and from Swiss television, regarding the