Marchand talks about SRG financing and Schawinski about saving money

SRG could merge the two radio stations because they have "converged a lot musically," Schawinski said in an interview with the newspaper Schweiz am Wochenende published Saturday. Radio SRF news broadcasts in German-speaking Switzerland could perhaps be produced with 150 employees instead of 200, he told the online portal Watson.

Show perspectives

The SRG leadership under Director General Gilles Marchand would have to show where it wants to steer SRG even before the vote on March 4. "Marchand has now been in office for a hundred days. This would be a good time to present his announced concept of a 'new SRG'. He could score points with that," Schawinski told the newspaper. The SRG management has "not yet recognized the seriousness of the situation, otherwise it would have signaled long ago that it is prepared to make cuts in programming."

Financing variants

Marchand himself expressed his views in the French-speaking Swiss daily newspaper Le Temps self-critical. Asked whether SRG was partly to blame for the No Billag initiative, he replied that SRG should certainly have communicated and explained more with the population. The SRG is ready to discuss its financing, he said. It wants to "propose certain variants to the population," the SRG director said. Marchand also pointed out the difficulties: It is not possible to provide a public service in public television and radio within the framework of a performance mandate entirely without fee income, he said. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find financing models for the "pay-per-view" generation. In the "pay what you watch" model, exactly what is being consumed is paid for. In Schawinski's view, pay models such as TV subscriptions only work for "sports, movies and porn," but not for information services such as the "Tagesschau," as he told Watson.

Liquidity bottleneck as of March 5

If the people vote in favor of No-Billag, SRG will very quickly head for bankruptcy and liquidation, Schawinski continued. "Liquidity would quickly decrease drastically. Suppliers would immediately demand payment in advance, SRG would no longer be able to conclude annual deals in the advertising market - and viewers would immediately stop paying their fees." At the same time, SRG would have to set aside hundreds of millions of francs for the social plan. According to Schawinski, SRG would collapse "very quickly by any business logic." The text of the initiative leaves no other way out for SRG, especially since there is no time to do so, as the transition period lasts only a few months.

Read original

SRG Director Marchand asked in the Le Temps-In an interview, the author urged readers to read the text of the initiative in detail. The public should not be misled. Schawinski accused the initiative committee of doing just that. They wanted to "seriously mislead" the electorate into believing that the initiative "would not be implemented as strictly as they themselves had formulated it. At the same time, they had kept the text "deliberately crystal clear". "This is a unique occurrence in the history of Swiss democracy, that the initiators promise before the ballot that their initiative will only be partially implemented, in order to score points. For me, this is a blatant form of smoke-and-mirrors tactics," Schawinski criticized. (SDA)