In the past few years, critiques, threats hate speeches, and even personal and physical harassment of journalists have increased in most countries, including in Switzerland. The harassments are not only by rude people on social media, but also by authoritarian politicians, like former American president, Donald Trump. In Germany, for example, 60 per cent of 322 interviewed journalists reported of such incidents in 2019 (Hildebrand, 2020). Moreover, the Covid-19 crisis also was used by autocratic regimes to restrict press and media freedom. For this reason, the editors-in-chief and journalists were asked in our study, the kinds of protective measures that were by editorial offices and publishing companies against such types of (online) harassments.
In general, the situation vis-à-vis this is not too bad in Switzerland. However, there have been at least two publicly known cases of personal attacks, one at the chief-editor of the political weekly magazine Weltwoche and the other at a journalist of Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) in Geneva, both in 2019. And some other incidents of cyberstalking had also been reported by our interviewed journalists, like an incident involving a female journalist by the Albanian community.
It was mentioned in our interviews that such incidents would be discussed usually with the superiors of the directly concerned journalists, and they would be provided with assistance. Furthermore, most print media organisations have a legal department or at least a specialised service dealing with social media. And on the national level, there exists a centre for complaints by the Swiss Press Council. To conclude, at least at the moment, personal harassment of journalists in Switzerland seems to be not a major problem (so far), compared to staff reductions in most editorial offices, especially due to the ongoing the Covid-19 crisis through spring 2020.
