Ordinary Citizens in Swiss Public Television News: Representing a National Public Sphere?

Abstract

Similar to the European Union, Switzerland faces the challenge of a multilingual and multicultural public sphere. The swiss media finds itself in-between the goals of providing a national Swiss public and ensuring a political, social, and cultural integration on a domestic level. Therefore, the portrayal of ordinary citizens in public debates on Swiss television news becomes a matter of citizen actors representing the “people’s voice” as counterbalance to elite and civil institutional actors; as well as citizen actors as a representation of Switzerland’s multilingual and multicultural public sphere as an element of understanding, solidarity, and exchange between the three language areas. Our quantitative content analysis within the news of the first channels in each language region (SRF 1, RTS un and RSI LA 1) shows that although ordinary citizens function as counterparts to political and other elite actor groups, their high visibility does not equate strong voices being heard in the national public debate. Ordinary citizens very rarely get the chance to actively raise their voices or represent voices from other language areas.

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