To be or not to be. On 4 March this year, the Swiss people had the fate of public broadcasting in their hands. They had to vote on a proposal to change the Swiss constitution in a way that would have made public broadcasting in Switzerland impossible: the licence fee would have been abolished, and direct or indirect subsidies by the government forbidden. A yes to the ‘No Billag’ referendum would have been the end for the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) and 6000 people would have lost their jobs. This film, broadcast 4 days after the referendum, shows the immense pressure that is brought on public broadcasting from all sides, not just in recent years. The far right (which is the strongest political force in Switzerland), has seen the SBC as the ‘enemy within’ for decades. The expansion strategy of the SBC in the 90s created the far biggest and most powerful media company of Switzerland. With Facebook and Google sucking advertisement money out of the market on a huge scale, the publishers started to fight the one competitor within reach: public broadcasting. For them the SBC is far too big and takes away from their business. This narrative, published in thousands of articles over the last years, became a sort of widespread public opinion. That’s the soil on which a group of young libertarians was able to launch the referendum which shook the SBC to their core.
[Complete title: Im Kreuzfeuer: wie die SRG unter Druck kam = In the crossfire: how the SBC got under pressure]