Although he still wants to hold out until the bitter end, Armin Walpen's days of rule are numbered. And so it is now appropriate to take stock of his 13-year reign at the SRG. So what are the milestones of his reign? 1. Armin Walpen managed to cement the SRG's monopoly at the language regional level.
Thanks to him, Switzerland is now the only country in the world in which a single institution has both the national TV and the domestic radio information monopoly. However, Walpen uae rcs data was not able to secure this anachronistic, anti-democratic situation without help. This required the ideological and practical support of Media Minister Moritz Leuenberger ("We need a strong SRG") and the capitulation of the major publishers, above all Ringier (money for "Presse-TV", airtime for "Vis-à-vis" by Frank A. Meyer).
Walpen achieved his goal using some highly questionable methods. In 2000, he persuaded radio owners in western Switzerland to support the SRG monopoly in the language region during the consultation on the new radio and television law by promising them 15 million Swiss francs in license fees that he did not have at his disposal. In this way, he used a sophisticated federalist approach to break down resistance to total SRG dominance - and he was successful.