Public speech not free
By Edith Bachkoenig Posted Apr 1 2000
“I am going to the demonstration now. Who is coming with me?” No answer. Three of my colleagues are in the room. But there is no reaction except for astonished looks. “Is there something to be afraid of?” I ask. “Of course not,” the personnel department representative at ORF, the Austrian public broadcasting system, replies. “Of course you can go.” Everybody has the right to free expression, but it is not conducive if you expose yourself actively, according to the objectivity guidelines of the law of public broadcasting. That means I can have my opinion in private but not in public. No interviews in newspapers, no political statements.
Such things have happened before, says the lady from the personnel department, and the journalists involved received warnings from the director general’s office. The reason: “The credibility of news reporting cannot be guaranteed if the reporter is politically biased.”
So I go silently to the demonstration immediately after the swearing-in ceremony of the members of the new coalition government. There are police cordons in front of the Royal Palace in the Hofburg. I am standing at the iron fence encircling the palace. In front of me is a row of policemen and women, their uniforms smeared by smashed tomatoes and eggs. Behind them are journalists working from mobile studios and interviewing the new minister of interior affairs. Rocks are thrown from behind me. Journalists from other European countries are running to the cordon to talk to us. What if a journalist questions me? What can I say if I am asked about the reason I am here? Nothing. I had better say nothing. In the afternoon I read about a journalist who was brave but had to take the consequences.
Gerhard Marschall, a prominent journalist and editor at the leading independent regional paper Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten, was fired on Feb. 4, the day the new Austrian government was sworn in amid worldwide protests. He had regularly written columns and articles fiercely critical of Joerg Haider, the leader of the Freedom Party, which joined with the conservative party to form a coalition government.
The publisher and the editor in chief of the newspaper said that the timing was purely coincidental. They argued that 450 former readers of the paper had cancelled their subscriptions over the last year citing the aggressive style of Marschall as a reason for their cancellations. The newspaper emphasized that the decision to dismiss the journalist was based on style, not content. Nonetheless, colleagues of Marschall and the Austrian Journalists Union protested the dismissal, and maintained that there was now a desire for a different kind of reporting, that Marschall was the first political victim of the New Right and that the newspaper had capitulated to the new government.
“A newspaper lives from its readers and their satisfaction,” the editor in chief of Oberoesterreichische Nachrichten, Hans Koeppl, responded. “Marschall’s style was insulting for many of them. Something had to be done about it. I admit that it doesn’t look very good.” A Journalists’ Union representative countered that Marschall’s style had not changed radically since he had been headhunted by the newspaper five years ago.
Whatever the merits of the professional as opposed to the political case against Marschall, the dismissal is a “signal, working against critical, independent and free journalism,” the editorial office of the ORF regional center in Linz said in a statement. On February 7, an estimated 500 people demonstrated outside the Oberoesterreichishe Nachrichten building in Linz, and demanded the reinstatement of Marschall.
Many Austrians have declared their solidarity with Gerhard Marschall. And I do, too. Plurality of opinion is the foundation of democracy in Austria — as long as it is private, not public.