Switzerland Today

Dear Swiss Abroad,

If the media was a pack of dogs, which breed would your favourite newspaper be? Aggressive Rottweiler or scoop-sniffing Bloodhound? Or dictator-loving lapdog? More on dogs and metaphors in today’s briefing, after the news of the day.

© Keystone

In the news: hacks, health perceptions, and electric car projections.

• The hacker group “Play” made good today on its threat to publish stolen data from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) media group on the darknet. According to the NZZ, the 500 gigabytes published online includes employee data, although it was unclear whether customer data has also been compromised. It comes a day after hackers published data stolen from Basel’s education department.
• Swiss people feel healthier than residents in any other country in Europe, according to a continent-wide survey. Of the 18,000 individuals in Switzerland who took part in the poll, 3.9% rate their health as poor or rather poor, compared to 8.8% in the EU. Higher education and higher income levels are correlated with higher levels of perceived health, the Federal Statistical Office said.
• The Swiss energy ministry has published a study indicating that the country is likely to see 2.8 million electric vehicles on its roads by 2035 (the human population is c.9 million). This will require up to 84,000 publicly accessible charging points across the country, compared to the 10,000 currently available, the ministry said. The study also says that the electrification of cars is progressing faster than expected.

Keystone / Jean-christophe Bott

Gone to the dogs: the Swiss Media Forum

Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter adopted a strange communications strategy at the Swiss Media Forum in Luzern today. Pledging to combat the “discrediting” of the media, she promptly proceeded to compare journalists to dogs: some of them yappers, others as nippers, and others who want to bite at everything except the source that feeds them.

Of course, Keller-Setter was not trying to have a go at the media, but rather to defend its role as “watchdog” of democracy – as part of the ecosystem keeping an eye on power and upholding political and rational stability. However, Kennel-Sutter added, this role is now under attack by “alternative media” and various other challenges to the credibility of journalism.

And to return to the dog metaphors: while some media bark too soon, others bite too early, and some go after the wrong heel, the real problem is when trust in general is lost. As such, Collar-Sutter said, every step that media takes to boost public confidence in its daily work is a good thing for democracy. We trust she’s reading our new series on this!

© Keystone / Gian Ehrenzeller

Brienz: when the rock is loose, the last thing you need is an earthquake.

All eyes – including internationallyExternal link – are on the Graubünden village of Brienz/Brinzauls this week, after villagers were told to leave their homes by Friday due to a rockfall threat. And then: as if the town didn’t have enough to worry about, yesterday a notification came from the Swiss Seismological Service, registering a 3.6 magnitude earthquake in the town of Thusis, just 15 kilometres away from Brienz.

And while a magnitude of 3.6 is not a lot, it could sound like a lot when you’re already worried about two million cubic metres of rock dangling over your head; it also would have been the second-heftiestExternal link quake felt in Switzerland this year.

Luckily however, it quickly turned out to be a “false alarm”; the notification had not been generated and sent via the usual channels of the Seismological Service, Keystone-SDA reported on Wednesday evening – it had been sent out mistakenly by a doctoral student at the institute.

Was the student trying to speed up the evacuation mission? Or ride the Brienz media wave? Not at all: apparently, the cause might have been a 7.6 magnitude quake which happened around the same time yesterday in Tonga, more than 17,000 kilometres from Brienz – whose residents can now scrap “earthquake” from their list of concerns…