Egg dances around journalistic quality

Both Imhof's broadcasts and the reactions of sensitive recipients seem to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding: They confuse quality with level. In my view, quality refers to a whole number of verifiable achievements and characteristics, e.g., honest handling of sources, presentation of controversial opinions independently of those of the reporter with their best arguments, linguistic purity, disclosure of gaps, as they are unavoidable due to current events. On balance, journalistic quality is achieved when the intended target groups or the specific reading situations are served in such a way that comprehensibility is created and, in the best case, understanding is possible. In other words, the Glückspost can also be a quality medium if it works according to the criteria listed above. Level, on the other hand, is characterized by the form of presentation: It is a truism that Blick am Abend and NZZ are at different cognitive altitudes. But is it permissible to compare one with the other, or even to condemn one and canonize the other? Who would think of comparing H&M with Prada or McDonald's with the Kronenhalle? What is self-evident in the case of clothing, restaurants and a hundred other business offerings - namely, the satisfaction of needs at very different levels - is also commonplace in the case of the media.

As a former tabloid journalist (seven years in the editorial management of Blick) and nearly twenty years at the helm of local free newspapers, I protest from experience against Imhof's insinuation that popular and free equate to irrelevance and an inevitable lack of quality. Have we not, in hundreds of specific individual cases - and always under a time pressure that is alien to media science - dissected out the qualitative deficiencies of a story in an attempt to formulate a tabloid headline? Didn't the subscription-based quality media in their best days derive up to 80 percent of their income from advertising, so that they could confidently have been called "four-fifths free media"? The form of distribution as a sign of quality - what an absurdity! I insist: It is possible to translate even highly complex contexts into comprehensibility. If this were not possible, our direct democracy would be a farce. Here, even the non-academically educated service technician and the waitress are expected to vote yes or no on highly complex issues such as mass immigration, genetic engineering or gold policy. From that point of view, the professorial disdain for popular media is a presumption. Incidentally, I have found in dozens of cases - especially in the case of elaborate foreign research - that the research at Blick has been more thorough, because it has been more direct, while the pack of supposedly righteous media has disseminated a comparatively inferior, but uniform and thus, so to speak, "generally binding" agency version.

Of course, the criticism of many journalistic practitioners of the media scolding that sounds from the professorial high seat is also stupid and short-sighted. Why do journalists and their superiors still resist methods of objective quality measurement that are standard not only in industry but also in every conceivable service sector? Why are there ISO-certified trust companies, investment consultancies, educational institutions, law firms and other intellectual service providers, but not editorial offices? (More about this on http://www.sqs.ch/de/Leistungsangebot/ Branchen/Dienstleistungen) Is it the arrogant opinion that everything is fundamentally different for us than for everyone else anyway? Or is it the simple fear of objective quality and performance measurement?

Karl Lüönd is a freelance publicist and book author