Study shows: Almost three quarters of all SRG journalists are left-wing
According to a report in the SonntagsZeitung, detailed figures from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) are available for the first time, providing information about the political attitudes of SRG journalists.
The data was collected by journalism researchers Vinzenz Wyss and Filip Dingerkus as part of an international journalism study between 2014 and 2016, but has not yet been published.
The results are clear and are likely to confirm many people's prejudices: 70 percent of SRG journalists describe themselves as left-wing, 16 percent count themselves as part of the political center and 16 percent of those surveyed classify themselves as right-wing. Whereas none of the media professionals on the scale identify themselves as being on the far right (values 9 and 10), 7.4 percent of the journalists describe themselves as being on the far left (values 0 and 1).
According to study author Dingerkus, however, SRG journalists do not differ significantly from their colleagues in the private media - where 62 percent describe themselves as left-wing. The fact that most journalists are left-wing is therefore not a prejudice, but a fact. Vinzenz Wyss suspects as an explanation that the journalistic function of criticism and control correlates more strongly with a leftist sociopolitical mindset. That's why he doesn't see the danger of one-sided reporting - a good left-wing journalist questions a left-wing politician just as critically, he says.
Even if one could assume that this evaluation is grist to the mill of the No Billag advocates - according to the SonntagsZeitung, the No Billag initiators are not bothered by the left-wing bias. It doesn't matter who is on which political side in journalistic terms, says initiator Christian Riesen.
For the study, 909 journalists in Switzerland were surveyed - 600 journalists from private media and 163 from SRG answered the question about their political views. (hae)
