How do the complaints bodies for Swiss radio and television help with media defamation and false statements?
We explore this question using a real-life example.
Imagine you are contacted by a public media company, such as Swiss Radio and Television SRF.
You would then have to decide within a day whether you want to answer questions for a TV interview on the program 10vor10.
Topic of the program: Malicious people are making serious accusations against you, lying through their teeth and accusing
you of disinformation and spreading conspiracy theories.
The fact that the entire program is a lie to you from A to Z, and that you can only make a small statement in the
interview, is already evident in the journalist's question.
This does not really increase your motivation to accept.
Perhaps you are on vacation or have already had a busy day at work.
Sometimes it happens.
And now you only have a few hours left to agree to the interview or to write a statement on
which your reputation among the population depends.
You should also bear in mind that all previous statements and counter-statements by this medium have
always been severely curtailed, published in the wrong context or simply not published at all.
In the end, you decide to write a statement anyway.
But you can't resist pointing out to the broadcaster that not a single uncensored statement has been published to date.
And we should first clean up our own backyard before ranting and raving about others
Now, two weeks later, the announced program appears at prime time.
It contains blatant misinformation, distortions and outright lies.
In addition, you will also be called defamatory and disparaging names.
As was to be expected, your statement is only reproduced in a very truncated and distorted way.
The whole show is structured in such a way that your defense is completely drowned out by all the accusations and slander.
That's not how it works!
You decide to submit a so-called "complaint" to the SRG ombudsman's office, in which you also
demand a correction of the false information from SRF.
You will receive a rebuffing explanation in response:
The ombudsman's office has no authority to issue instructions to the station's editorial team.
A correction could only be enforced by civil law.
If you consider your criticism to be a complaint, this should be communicated, stating the reasons why the program
violates the principle of fairness under broadcasting law.
All right.
Strange, you had just submitted a four-page justification using the official complaint form.
So after you have filled out the official form a second time and added a trivial form
sentence, you now receive the following reply:
The ombudsman's office maintains that the protagonist of the contested program is a credible person, even
though you have just proven a handful of airtight lies.
All accusations are rejected.
The next step would be to appeal to the Independent Complaints Authority for Radio and Television (UBI).
After you set off on your journey with a little hope and send two letters to the UBI, you first receive the reply that
your complaint has been forwarded to the SRG Legal Service.
Wait a minute - the SRG ombudsman's office had already received this complaint from you!
Well, patience brings roses.
Four weeks later, you will receive the SRG Legal Service's statement to the UBI for your information.
The legal service also continues to stand by the lying statements in the defendant program.
As evidence, he cites a dubious witness statement with no address given.
This so-called witness is anything but well-disposed towards you and is just waiting to really get one over on you.
So now you think you have to take the helm yourself.
They conduct a survey of their employees who are also affected by the false statements in that SRF program.
Your question to the employees is whether the incidents alleged in the program actually happened.
You then receive 45 answers, as I have here, which refute the statements with
watertight arguments and expose them as solid lies.
You send these to the UBI, which forwards them to the SRG Legal Service.
And then finally, seven months after the broadcast, the UBI will hold a public consultation to which you will be invited.
Of course you accept the invitation.
But the public consultation is a real ordeal for you:
Without being allowed to speak yourself, you have to listen to how the blatantly false statements of the 10vor10
program are justified with all kinds of legal contortions.
The UBI panel's lawyer, who is leading the discussion, has even come up with new,
self-researched but completely absurd arguments against you.
Until now, they had actually believed that the legal system would stand up for the party that had suffered injustice.
You would never have expected to experience the complete opposite.
The few voices that stand up for your justification are ultimately shot down by the
SRF-friendly "democratic" majority of the UBI panel.
But the defeat only hurts for a short time.
Because later you learn that, even if your complaint to the UBI had been successful, this would probably only
have resulted in a small note on the UBI homepage months after the defamatory program was broadcast.
Which of the hundreds of viewers who watched this program would think of checking the UBI
website months later to see if it was true?
You could only enforce a correction in the same broadcast format and at the same time as the original broadcast
by taking civil action, i.e. in court, for which you would have to invest a lot of money and time.
In the meantime, your reputation is already ruined anyway.
As you can guess, dear viewer, this example is real.
Kla.TV has experienced it for itself.
The link to the detailed wording of the Kla.TV complaint letters to the ombudsman's
office and the UBI can be found below the program.
Below the program you will also find the 45 witness statements that confirm the facts of the case.
And we are certainly not the only ones who have suffered such injustice.
The long route of a complaint with the aim of a correction would - in the best case - have resulted in a small
entry on the UBI page that probably nobody would have seen.
To summarize: The Swiss complaints offices for radio and television, which are part of the Swiss legal
system, let you down as soon as they are seriously needed.
It's like the expression "the cat bites its own tail".
You always return to the starting point and are therefore stuck in a vicious circle.