The far-right, which is on the verge of power in France, holds the key to the new prime minister’s survival. An out-of-control Emmanuel Macron has refused to acknowledge the outcome of the recent parliamentary elections, and is trampling over parliamentary principles. Meanwhile the Left, despite managing to unite, has failed to speak with one voice to counter the Élysée’s railroading.
It is against this deeply worrying political backdrop, one in which the public-interest mission of journalists takes on its full meaning, that the national conference on information – the États Généraux de l'Information (EGI) - has just published its conclusions. Drawing on contributions from professionals, citizens and academics, the final presentation of fifteen proposals to “safeguard and develop the right to information” was delivered on September 12th. This followed nine months of work which was overshadowed by the death of Christophe Deloire, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), who was appointed by Emmanuel Macron in November 2023 to head this initiative.
Given the dangers we face, the action plan put forward by members of the body's steering committee, all of whom were chosen by President Macron, is lacklustre in the extreme.
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Yet in its very introduction the report notes that there is a “democratic emergency” as well as an emergency concerning the provision of news, which is both a public and a common good, and which is essential for an informed public debate based on verified, cross-checked and well-documented facts, facts which are thus acknowledged and shared by all.
However, behind an apolitical veneer, the proposals are weakened by a major flaw: they suppose that the threat is coming almost exclusively from algorithms, networks, and artificial intelligence – in other words, from technology – and fail to identify the real enemies of the right to know. These enemies are political and economic actors, including those within the media, who use these tools as they use others, for their own gain, even at the cost of derailing democracy. By focusing attention on the ongoing digital disruption before addressing France's structural dysfunctions, the steering committee - chaired by Bruno Patino, head of the European public service television channel Arte - hampers the finding of solutions that match the scale of the problem.
One of the fundamental roles of the media is thus overlooked. Journalists are not just polite facilitators of a calm debate. By exercising their critical gaze, they form a vital counterbalance to ensure that democracy functions properly. Our social purpose is to make business interests and political powers face up to their responsibilities and hold them to account on behalf of citizens, and to expose any potential abuses.
As our institutions falter and the media falls prey to the voracity of a few predatory billionaires more concerned with their influence than the public interest, it is crucial that we don't aim at the wrong target. To restore information to its rightful place, the priority must be to drastically strengthen the independence of journalists who are the cornerstone of the entire structure.
Yet the EGI steering committee, keen not to upset shareholders, makes another mistake in its proposals by refusing to defend the right of staff to approve or to reject when it comes to the appointment of an editor. Such rights would allow editorial teams to have real oversight over their workplace bosses, who are selected by the owners. Instead, the proposals offer a watered-down version, suggesting that “ethics committees” may “give an opinion”. The right of approval and dismissal, supported by Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum, already exists in certain outlets such as Le Monde, Libération, and Mediapart, and they have never destabilised these enterprises. On the contrary, they have helped strengthen and empower the editorial teams.
Ensuring the independence of the profession also requires actively fighting against financial hardship. It is unfortunate that this aspect, which affects the freelancers and younger journalists among us the hardest, is completely absent from the action plan.
In the same vein, the measures recommended to protect the confidentiality of sources and combat gagging orders are insufficient in light of the massive attacks suffered by journalists and media organisations. The report does propose to “reduce” the scope of exceptions to the protection of sources, and for a judge who handles issues of individual liberty and custody to get involved before any legal proceedings, basing its demand on the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. However, it remains silent on the issue of commercial confidentiality, which has led to censorship, and on the protection of whistleblowers. Nor are sanctions envisaged if the protection of a source is breached.
When it comes to tackling legal harassment, which aims to intimidate and silence through criminal or commercial proceedings (commercial confidentiality, official secrets, commercial defamation, etc.), the suggested proposal lacks the kind of ambition that would deter attempts to circumvent the 1881 law on the freedom of the press.
Tackling the concentration of media ownership
To ensure the pluralism of news, the report should have been prepared to take on shareholders by actively fighting against the concentration of media ownership. The situation in France today is grotesque: ten or so industrial or financial groups, for most of whom news is not their core business, control the majority of the “major” private media outlets. This simply increases distrust among the public, who rightly demand news that is not only diverse but also free from the vested interests of media owners.
At a time when links with political leaders, particularly the government, are growing, such suspicions can only intensify. The example of the group belonging to French businessman Vincent Bolloré, which continues to expand its influence through fake news and hate messages, from Europe 1 radio to the CNews news channel, as well as news magazine Paris Match and Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD), is a telling one: its hegemonic ambitions - deeply damaging for the rule of law - are no secret. Yet nothing was done to prevent the takeover of the JDD in the summer of 2023, a newspaper where journalists were driven out following an unprecedented forty-day strike.
The fact that Pascal Praud, CNews's star presenter, learned of Emmanuel Macron's decision to dissolve the National Assembly in June before the then prime minister and almost all the ministers, demonstrates the shamefully porous relations between these two worlds. Thanks to this inside knowledge, the group placed all its media outlets at the service of the far-right, orchestrating the face-off between Macronism and the far-right Rassemblement National - the contest which the head of state wanted. The later decision by the newly-appointed prime minister Michel Barnier to make his first public comments in the columns of the JDD confirms the nature of this strategic alliance, which was the only one envisioned by the president, even though it proved a failure at the ballot box.
But rather than tackling this major democratic issue head-on, the EGI steering committee has limited itself to timid measures that will worry neither Vincent Bolloré nor the billionaires who use “their” media as tools to further their influence.
As recommended by those who took part in the États Généraux de la Presse Indépendante, launched in the autumn of 2023 at the behest of the Fonds pour une Presse Libre (FPL) – a body created by Mediapart's co-founders and staff - the first thing that should have been done was to prohibit any industrial group whose main activity is not news from directly running a media outlet. The next step should then have been to completely overhaul the 1986 law on the press by lowering the thresholds on the concentration of ownership in the media. Finally, the agreements used by broadcasting regulator ARCOM - the Autorité de Régulation de la Communication Audiovisuelle et Numérique - when allocating free-to-air broadcasting frequencies should have been required to prohibit the turning of a news channel into an opinion channel that broadcasts content contrary to journalists' ethical principles.
Making press subsides conditional
To clean up the media landscape and ensure transparency in its funding, the report unfortunately fails to acknowledge the need for a complete overhaul of press subsidies. Currently, these benefits go to the same few media barons who hold all the power. For greater fairness, these subsidies should be reserved for independent media, conditional upon compliance with legal obligations and ethical standards and, of course, should be withdrawn in the event of convictions for sexist, racist, LGBT-phobic, or discriminatory remarks.
The lack of clarity surrounding the distribution of subsidies only increases public mistrust, so there should be an obligation to show transparency, such as the annual publication of accounts for each outlet, and the disclosure of direct and indirect shareholders, plus the public and private subsidies they receive, and how they are used.
In the end, the most interesting measures aim to tackle the overwhelming power of online platforms, which do indeed pose a major threat by privatising the global information space for their own benefit. However, on top of the fact that the steering committee overlooks the central issue of fair remuneration for press-related rights and the need for transparency that comes with that, it is apparent that these measures are included in the action plan because shareholders are worried about losing their special privileges in a struggle that is not going their way.
In a speech delivered on April 10th 1907, marking his departure as a shareholder of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, media magnate Joseph Pulitzer - hardly a radical – stated that his Missouri newspaper would “... always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty”.
More than a century later, one might have expected more courage from a body meant to represent the interests of the profession and the public and for it to show more clarity about the battles ahead. Particularly given the fact that these are just proposals, with no guarantee they will lead to concrete outcomes in any potential future legislation.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter