Frank A. Meyer sharply criticizes Pietro Supino and the Swiss Media Association

The Ringier journalistic advisor has no love for the No Billag initiative: The "work of destruction" that was "decided over a beer" wants to smash the "great and solid, exemplary and admirable institution" that is SRG.

Meyer, however, is primarily concerned with the "powers that be playing their media policy game with the beer idea of No Billag" and - with the prospect of power and money - would organize a "manhunt" for Swiss radio and television.

Their "leader" is Tamedia Chairman Pietro Supino, who makes "respectable and repeatedly excellent journalism" with his titles, but whose "journalistic concentration of power" is "already not entirely unproblematic today.

Specifically, Meyer accuses Supino, as president of the Swiss Media Association (VSM), of instrumentalizing the association to push Tamedia's interests. In Meyer's view, the publishers' association should actually support SRG, since it cultivates different language cultures autonomously and on an equal footing and thus contributes a great deal to the "national whole. Instead, Supino had put the association "on an attack course against the SRG.

The demands that the VSM has made of SRG and to which it has linked its position on the No Billag initiative are actually Tamedia's demands, Meyer writes. This is "media-political blackmail" - the publishers are gambling away their honor.

With the announced purchase of Goldbach, the VSM president is now also in the service of the German private broadcasters. Goldbach lives from "selling Swiss advertising revenue to powerful German media (...) so that they can expand their Swiss market position even further", "at the expense of SRG".

The fact that the VSM wants to launch an attack on SRG advertising revenues after a No to the No Billag initiative shows that "the capitulators" are determined to do anything. (hae)