Box 3.3 Newspapers with differing political viewpoints: essential in a democracy but not guaranteed for all Swiss people

Take Zurich, the largest urban region, as an example. There we find three daily newspapers sharing a market with different afficianados. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which has an international reputation among elites, mostly combines governmental, institutional and conservative views of the enlightened bourgeois public, the Tagesanzeiger addresses a more liberal, well-educated, regional public, open to the views of the political left and turning a critical eye on government policy. The Blick, a popular daily newspaper, devotes much less space to politics. Trying to share ordinary people's views and sorrows, politics are presented as stories about people. In a referendum campaign about foreigners, Blick would push a story about an old, poor, retired Swiss worker who has less to live on then a Tamil asylum-seeker. That would not exclude the possibility of a story the next day accusing the federal authorities of being inhuman by sending a refugee back to his country. Blicks position, amplifying people's first-hand experiences and attitudes, could therefore be described as populist.

Not all readers in Switzerland have so much choice. Regional daily newspapers, to which people subscribe because of local news cannot, for evident reasons, meet the standards of the NZZ or the Tagesanzeiger. More problematic is the fact that in some regions we find a monopoly of one newspaper, which often prevents pluralism by suppressing views that do not correspond to its own.