No Billag Initiative - Cons - February 2018

Our topic here is the No Billag Initiative, which comes to a vote on March 4th, 2018. Billag is the company that has up to now been collecting the licence fees for TV and radio stations around Switzerland. The initiative wants to get rid of licence fees altogether and instead regularly auction them off. We sat down with a representative of each side to ask them why they were against and for the initiative, respectively.

For Sandie Collins from Operation Libero, the initiators "take my right to independent and well-balanced information out of the [Swiss] constitution. The initiators say it's not needed to have that in the constitution when you don't have the licence fee anymore, but I have a different opinion. In a direct democracy, it is important to have independent information - because what happens when the richest person decides what my information is going to be? The second important thing for me is the solidarity with the four linguistic regions and people with impaired vision or hearing. The free market can't give them information because it's not profitable enough." And: "In my opinion, there's a difference between relevant content and profitable content. Sometimes it's more important what's relevant than what's profitable."

Listen to the interview with a supporter of the initiative here.