The tallest Swiss woman took the Ringier television with her to Kyiv. The reporting borders on a farce. This is due to both sides, the TV channel as well as the politician.
Irène Kälin on April 27 during the meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv.
Then he asks again. The Blick TV reporter asked Irène Kälin whether it wasn’t sending the wrong signal when politicians from neutral Switzerland traveled to a war zone and showed solidarity with a party. Her answer: Not traveling would not be neutral.
It’s good. An important question, a telling answer. Both are in stark contrast to the rest of the interview conducted by the highest Swiss woman and the “Blick” journalist at Bern Airport. It borders on a farce. The turbines are already roaring, Kälin has the wind in her hair. The fact that the Rega base can be seen in the background is fitting. You’re on a mission.
The belly counts
The President of the National Council faces the camera for two and a half minutes. One would expect questions about how Switzerland should deal with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and weapons. Volodymyr Zelensky had made their delivery a condition for delegation visits. But that’s not an issue, instead you feel like you’re at a ski race. “How do you feel at the moment?” Asks the Blick TV journalist. “Are you scared?” And: “What are you particularly excited about?”
The episode is exemplary for reporting on the visit to Ukraine. Television accompanied Irène Kälin to Kyiv, where the National Councilor of the Greens traveled with a smaller delegation on Wednesday. Journalists from Keystone, SRF and Blick-TV should ensure transparency – as Kälin put it.
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Nothing helped, criticism rained down. The “Tages-Anzeiger”, for example, took offense, in an opinion piece the newspaper wrote that Kälin had “scratched the boundary between a message of solidarity and self-portrayal more than once”. The fact that the partner of the President of the National Council was once editor-in-chief of “Blick” may have played a role; today Werner De Schepper directs the “Schweizer Illustrierte”.
But the contributions from Blick TV are actually difficult to endure. But that has little to do with the question of whether Kälin wanted to stage herself or not (nor whether she succeeded). It’s the conversations themselves that border on the naive — which is down to those involved on either side of the mic. The titles of the Blick-TV contributions reveal something of this. They involuntarily counteract the state-political claim of the visit. For example, the headline for the video from Bern-Belp is “I have a queasy feeling”. The report on the (short) meeting with Selenski is adorned with the quote “Despite everything, he is a simple person”.
The critical boss
Back in Bern, Kälin is interviewed by the editor-in-chief of Blick, Christian Dorer. Dorer confronts Kälin with the criticism of the trip – the excerpt runs under the title “To be honest, that makes me a little sad”. And even the boss (who also asks tougher questions) insists on asking the National Councilor about “the most moving or worst” thing she may have seen on the spot.
Kälin’s answer makes you think of a ski race again. As if someone was injured and as if one only had to be optimistic about the future for everything to settle down. The most moving thing for the highest Swiss woman was that the Ukrainian government was already in reconstruction mode. That makes her very confident despite the “warlike actions in the Donbass”. It is “right and also nice” that the reconstruction is taking place.
These words do not sound like self-portrayal. They sound overwhelmed.