A trade unionist in the media sector for around ten years in the Zurich area, Idris Djelid, a dual Swiss and Algerian national, notes a difference between the French-speaking and German-speaking press when it comes to the treatment of information on demonstrations and mobilizations in Switzerland. Perfectly bilingual in French-German, he perceives, according to him, “a form of inaction” on the other side of the Sarine. Was it maintained consciously? “It’s difficult to say whether a real Röstigraben exists in terms of media coverage, but the fact remains that the demonstrations which have taken place in several cities over the past year have not had as much impact here as in Romandy, where they been often covered in the press, but that is not the case here,” he says. He also mentions pressures weighing on journalists, without naming them so as not to expose them.
Hosted on Baba News
Censored by their hierarchical superiors, two German-speaking journalists had to turn last May, at the height of mobilizations in universities across the country, to the Bernese online media Baba News to be published . Designed and powered mainly by women and reviewing information and other questions relating to migrants and their integration, this platform takes into account in particular the pulse of the Arabic-speaking population of Switzerland. One of its two editors-in-chief, Albina Muhtari, confirms that her media did host two articles this spring by journalists whose writings did not find favor in their own editorial offices. “It happened in the Zurich region,” she explains without further details.
Published on May 9, the first of these articles focused in particular on the mobilizations that occurred in the universities of Lausanne, Geneva, Bern and Zurich. From the pen of a certain Mr. Müller, we learn in particular that a professor at the University of Bern “verbally attacked a pro-Palestinian student”, before forcefully pushing him away by arguing, according to article, “that politics had no place at the university.” This anonymized pen also returns to a police raid at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (EPFZ), regrets that postcolonialism does not have the right to speak in the academic world and protests against “an orchestrated media smear campaign upstream”, the author suspecting two media in particular and which he cites, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) et 20 minutesto be at the origin. On Baba News, another comment, also incorrectly edited, was published a few days later under the pseudonym Tristan Gross. From the outset, this poses a disturbing question: “How are our media wrong in their coverage?”
No comment
This comment speaks out against “a pejorative representation of pro-Palestinian protests which are systematically portrayed as far-left anti-Semitic demonstrations,” he said, adding that this vision is “revolting and incorrect when reading the facts.” In his text, this anonymous journalist is also outraged at the contempt shown in the columns of several German-speaking media by demonstrators who use terms like “genocide” or “apartheid” regarding the policy pursued by Israel. “These mobilizations impose uncomfortable themes on the public square,” concludes the author of this comment, deploring in fine the absence of contradictory words, the information here being reduced to “slogans and concepts without much debate on the substance”.
In Bern, Albina Muhtari of Baba News reports “that an editorial line of rather pro-Israeli obedience” would be current across Sarine. But she also understands that the debate between the editors is still raging at the NZZ or to the Weekly newspaper (WoZ) For example. Asked about the way in which this war and its fallout are experienced in Zurich, and how, for example, the German spirit of repentance towards Israel could have influenced the feeling of the events in Zurich too, the WoZ told us that they did not have time “to respond within a reasonable time to our complex questions”. Among these: knowing whether the knife attack of which a member of the Jewish community in Zurich was tragically the victim at the beginning of March had influenced the way in which the conflict and its aftermath were handled. For Idris Djelid, it is possible that in German-speaking Switzerland “we want to avoid talking about Gaza and focus on Ukraine”.
“Laziness and complacency”
Depositary this week at the Federal Chancellery in Bern of a petition which asks the political and academic authorities to cease all repression against students while giving them freedom of speech, the lawyer from the NGO Swissactionforhumanrights, Tania Bukhari, for its part notes “greater criminalization against them, and not only in right-wing media,” she specifies. “They are often portrayed as radical people. We’re actually only talking about October 7 here! It is illegitimate and criminal to ignore everything that is happening in Palestine,” said this human rights defender, suspecting the media of “laziness and complacency”.
Not everyone. A call for signatures “to protect journalists in Gaza” is circulating, which is based on statistics from Reporters Without Borders reporting 140 professionals killed, including around thirty in the course of their work. “In Switzerland, certain editorial offices seem to accept the blatant restrictions on press freedom as a given,” this recent appeal complains.
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