Switzerland – (F1) Geographic distribution of news media availability

news media are widely available in Switzerland. The media landscape is characterized by high levels of public access and technical reach. There are no regional divides. Each linguistic area is provided with its own media: private, commercial and public service radio and television stations, daily and weekly newspapers as well as various periodicals.

The public broadcaster SRG SSR runs between three and six radio stations for each part of the country (German, French and Italian). For the Rhaeto-Romanic part, there is an almost full-service radio programme. In each linguistic region there is a television studio (Geneva, zurich, Lugano), producing independent programmes, two for each region and one in the Rhaeto-Romanic language (only a few hours per week). In addition, the German part of Switzerland is provided with a 24-hour information channel, repeating the latest news programmes initially shown on one of the two regular channels. Furthermore, 87 private radio stations and 105 private TV stations broadcast in local and regional markets (BAKOM 2010).¹

Table 2.        Number of broadcast media in Switzerland

Sources: SRG SSR idée Suisse Geschäftsbericht 2009, p. 36-37; 50-51,  Federal Office of Communications / BAKOM 2010:  http://www.bakom.admin.ch/themen/radio_tv/marktuebersicht/index.html?lang=en

Almost every Swiss household has one or more radio receivers, and 92 per cent are equipped with one or more television receivers (BfS, 2008²). 80 per cent of all households have access to cable TV and receive over 50 channels; 15 per cent of all Swiss households have access to a satellite dish (Meier, 2010).

The existence of 203 different newspapers (including non-dailies) makes Switzerland one of the richest countries in terms of number of newspapers published in proportion to its population and geographical size (data for 2008, BfS; Meier 2010). newspapers are widely available in all regions. All cantonal capitals and almost all major Swiss cities have at least one regional newspaper. nonetheless, the number of existing newspapers has decreased rapidly in the past decades. In 1939 there were exactly twice as many titles on the market. Furthermore, big publishing houses are in possession of different newspapers in different regions. This fact diminishes the diversity of newspapers, as they often share most of the sections and only provide a minimum on exclusive local or regional content. The following table illustrates impressively that only a few publishing houses control the leading newspapers in the 26 cantons. The number of independent newspapers is around 30³.

Table 3a.     Newspapers focusing language regions

Table 3b.     Leading regional newspapers in the 26 cantons

* Strong content syndication: newspaper is subsidiary and only produces regional section and takes over complete sections (e.g., culture, foreign politics, national politics, economy) from its “mother” newspaper/main edition.

** Content syndication: newspaper relies on content of another newspaper insofar as it prints a selection of articles from its “mother” newspaper/main edition. The newspaper Der BunD consists of 60 % of articles from Tages-anzeiger. Others rely less on purchased content.

There is only one national news wire service (SDA) that produces output in German, French and Italian. After having bought the news agency office of Associate Press in January 2010, SDA has the monopoly.