The Media Big Bang
Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2025 4:52 am
It was the Big Bang. When the first local radio stations began operating 30 years ago, the lean years were over: There was blaring and rocking music everywhere. The monopoly of the unpopular SRG had apparently been broken. And this exactly six years before the real fall of the Berlin Wall. In the euphoria, no one wanted to acknowledge that DRS 3 began operating on the same night.
November 1, 1983 was also a turning point for this writer. With my high school diploma and horn-rimmed glasses, I became an intern at the Schaffhausen local station Munot. With unbridled saudi arabia rcs data euphoria, we covered the region with nonstop radio activity. Bikini girls were carted onto the Rhine bridge in the snow, toboggan runs were built through the city and the new station celebrated its 1st birthday in a circus tent. Befitting its status. It was a great time, even if the “Spiegel” sneered at the new stations: “Commercialism on megahertz with all sorts of nonsense.” There is not much left of commerce. Radio advertising is at an all-time low.
It is probably an irony of fate that most private radio stations only survive thanks to a subsidy from the SRG license fee pot. The whole revolution was a masterpiece of "repressive tolerance": the monopoly was broken in order to consolidate it. Real competition - at a national level at that - remains undesirable. But perhaps the whole liberalization was also a stroke of genius for what was possible: 44 private radio stations enrich Switzerland today. But only one person really wanted to celebrate on November 1st: SRF 3. "Allotria" is elsewhere.
November 1, 1983 was also a turning point for this writer. With my high school diploma and horn-rimmed glasses, I became an intern at the Schaffhausen local station Munot. With unbridled saudi arabia rcs data euphoria, we covered the region with nonstop radio activity. Bikini girls were carted onto the Rhine bridge in the snow, toboggan runs were built through the city and the new station celebrated its 1st birthday in a circus tent. Befitting its status. It was a great time, even if the “Spiegel” sneered at the new stations: “Commercialism on megahertz with all sorts of nonsense.” There is not much left of commerce. Radio advertising is at an all-time low.
It is probably an irony of fate that most private radio stations only survive thanks to a subsidy from the SRG license fee pot. The whole revolution was a masterpiece of "repressive tolerance": the monopoly was broken in order to consolidate it. Real competition - at a national level at that - remains undesirable. But perhaps the whole liberalization was also a stroke of genius for what was possible: 44 private radio stations enrich Switzerland today. But only one person really wanted to celebrate on November 1st: SRF 3. "Allotria" is elsewhere.