Ln January 16, the host of C8’s flagship program “Touche pas à mon poste” (“TPMP”) broke into a long and violent diatribe against public broadcasting.
Without contradicting, in front of an audience of chroniclers as docile as they are in a hurry to show their deference to their boss, Cyril Hanouna delivered his sentence: “4 billion euros? ! » ; “With 4 billion, we can make cars for the police, we can offer some hospitals, we can increase teachers…”, “Privatize all that for me! » So much for the nuance and the quality of the argument.
“4 billion euros? ! », is it still too much? It doesn’t matter that France is one of the countries in Europe where the financing of public broadcasting has experienced the most budget cuts in recent years and that the abolition of the license fee mortgages its financial future. It does not matter that with 0.16% of the gross domestic product (GDP), the amount devoted to it is much lower than among our German friends (0.27%) and English (0.28%).
ideological crusade
Why worry about the fact that the quality of public information is a determining condition for the democratic vitality of a country and that it pulls the quality of information in general upwards? For Cyril Hanouna, the problem is not that we spend 4 billion euros, but that we can devote every euro to public broadcasting.
And too bad if French men and women consider that they can find more “independent” and more “neutral” information as well as more “intelligent” and “serious” programs on public radio and television channels (see, for example, the OpinionWay study published in 2018 on “The future of public broadcasting”), at the very time when disinformation and conspiracy theories are multiplying. And where the media – notably those which are today in the hands of Vincent Bolloré – are placed at the service of an ideological crusade.
It must be said that, on the side of the private media, the trend in recent years has been rather towards the lessening of political pluralism on the screen. C8 and Cnews, owned by Vincent Bolloré, have been served formal notice on several occasions by the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom), the former Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA), for breach of rules of pluralism in the media.
They did not hesitate to under-declare the airtime of representatives of the far right, to the point that a study by the site Politiquemedias counted between June 2020 and June 2021 more far-right guests (36 %) at CNews than guests from the left (17%) and the presidential majority (17%) gathered…
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