A highly controversial law giving French presidents the power to nominate the heads of the country’s state-funded television channels and radio stations, introduced in 2009 under the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, is set to be abolished this autumn when a bill of law guaranteeing the independence of the publicly-owned broadcast media is to be put before the Senate.
The bill, the result of an election campaign promise by socialist President François Hollande, was approved last month by parliament’s lower house, the National Assembly, and the Left-dominated Senate is expected to rubber stamp the legislation.
Under the new law, the appointments will be made by the quasi-independent national audiovisual media regulator, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA).
Sarkozy, who both in and out of office has had a regularly turbulent relationship with the French media in general, first announced his intention to control the nominations of public television and radio heads in an extraordinary announcement on June 25th 2008. “I am for a simple and democratic system,” he said, “namely nomination by the executive [office].”
This principally concerned France Télévisions [1], which has five national channels including the two generalist state TV channels, France 2 and France 3, the multi-station radio broadcaster Radio France, and broadcasters dedicated to serving an international audience, called France Médias Monde, which includes rolling TV news channel FRANCE 24 and Radio France International (RFI).
Sarkozy’s move annulled the recommendations of a report, completed just before his announcement, by a public commission of enquiry into the future of the public audiovisual media, which was simply shelved, and came six months after his contentious plan to ban advertising from the state-funded TV channels.
Regarded by his opponents as a symbol of the interventionism in public institutions that characterised his five-year presidency between 2007 and 2012, Sarkozy’s mooted plan to control the management of public broadcasters was subsequently approved by the then-conservative majority in parliament and became law on March 5th 2009.
The new socialist bill, if approved by both houses of parliament, will become law by the end of the year at the earliest, and by May 2014 at the latest – when the mandate for the current, Sarkozy-approved president of Radio France reaches its end.
Under the new bill, the presidents of France Télévisions, Radio France and France Médias Monde will each be appointed by the CSA for a five-year term of office. A Socialist Party amendment to the bill gives the CSA the power to cut short a mandate in exceptional circumstances.
The bill also includes a reduction in the number of members of the CSA board, from the current nine to seven. This will be implemented gradually, according to the ending of the current mandates of the board (the first three are due to end in January 2015) and will be complete by 2019.
Until now, three of the nine members of the board were nominated by the French president, but the bill will allow for the appointment of just one of the new number of seven board members to be chosen by the head of state.
As under the current system, the presidents (speakers) of the National Assembly and the Senate will each appoint three members of the board, six in total. But under the new system, their choices must have been approved beforehand by the cross-party cultural affairs committees of their respective houses, and this by a majority of three-fifths. “The parliamentary opposition will be taking part in the choice. We’re changing the paradigm of the 5th Republic where the ruling majority has all the powers at its disposal,” commented socialist Member of Parliament (MP) Marcel Rogemont, the rapporteur for the bill.
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1: The TV stations run by France Télévisions are: France 2, the principal channel which targets a broad audience; France 3, with a schedule partly similar to France 2 but which also broadcasts regional programmes; France 4, with a broad schedule directed towards an audience aged 20-40; France 5, with a culture and knowledge schedule consisting largely of current affairs programmes and documentaries; France Ô, focusing on reports about France’s overseas territories.
Inauspicious beginnings
In the vote in the National Assembly on July 25th, the bill was passed by a majority composed of MPs from the Socialist Party, their Centre-Left allies from the Radical Party of the Left (PRG) and the Green alliance party EELV (to which culture minister Aurélie Filippetti belongs). The same parties hold a majority in the Senate, making its approval by the upper house in a vote this autumn all but sealed.
Filippetti, speaking after the vote in July, hailed what she called “a major law for independence of the public audiovisual media” and which placed confidence in the capacity of parliament’s members “to transcend partisan politics”.
The Front de Gauche party, an alliance radical left-wing parties situated to the Left of the socialists, abstained in the vote. While describing the bill as “an important symbolic first act”, it called for “a different ambition” in the process of nominating the heads of state media. “The participation of trades unions, radio listeners and television audiences [would have] deserved to be studied and debated,” said one of its MPs, Marie-George Buffet, a former Communist Party general secretary. “It’s a missed opportunity,” she added.
The bill was opposed by the main conservative opposition party, the UMP (of which Nicolas Sarkozy is a member), and its Centre-Right allies the UDI. The UMP’s principle argument is that the bill, misleadingly, actually upholds the traditional power of politicians. During the debates, the party’s MPs and specialists on issues concerning the audiovisual media, Franck Riester and Christian Kert, argued that the new system lost the transparency of the old while maintaining the links between the political powers and state broadcasters.
They also criticized the ending, as foreseen by the bill, of parliament’s right to veto the nomination of a head of a state-funded broadcaster. Currently, parliament can overturn a president’s choice if it votes by a two-thirds majority to do so, although this is a largely impractical mechanism given that since 2002 successive presidents have enjoyed a large parliamentary majority.
The UMP argued for the creation of a new regulating institution to be called the Higher Audiovisual Authority (Haute Autorité de l’Audiovisuel), made up of 50 members “representative of the French territories and society”. The bill’s rapporteur, Marcel Rogemont, dismissed the project as “untenable”. “Who would nominate who?” he asked. “How would its members be chosen?”
The opposition’s criticism that the bill does not represent a clear departure of political influence holds some water, and the appointment in January by François Hollande of Olivier Schrameck as head of the CSA is hardly a break with the past; Schrameck was chief-of-staff to former socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin between 1997 and 2002. Schrameck’s predecessor, Michel Boyon, appointed under Nicolas Sarkozy, was the former chief-of-staff of former conservative prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, between 2003 and 2005.
Then there is also the replacement in July last year – two months after the new socialist government came to power - of Alain de Pouzilhac when he resigned as head of the state-funded international media group, France Médias Monde. Pouzilhac’s management was regularly contested by staff unions, and his leadership was openly criticized by the two ministers who are administratively his superior hierarchy, culture minister Aurélie Filippetti and foreign affairs minister Laurent Fabius. While his replacement, Marie-Christine Saragosse, was broadly welcomed by staff, her appointment by President Hollande was made using exactly the same manner and powers that Nicolas Sarkozy created.
Similarly, the bill offers no absolute guarantees that political motives will not interfere with the proposed nominations of the CSA board members by the French president and the presidents of the National Assembly and Senate.
Rémy Pflimlin, the current head of France Télévisions and appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010, has embarked on a cost-cutting plan that involves an estimated 650 job cuts and the slashing of a number of programmes (including Des mots de minuit, a 13 year-old chat show dedicated to the arts and Taratata, a 20 year-old music show that presented international rock bands). Meanwhile, the unpopular task for Pflimlin, who appears certain to be shown the door when his mandate expires in 2015, is further complicated by frequent criticism over his management decisions by culture minister Aurélie Filippetti, who appears, despite it all, unable to cut the political cordon. Plus ça change…
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English version by Graham Tearse
- The French version of this article can be found here.