EDITO — Cartelistic behavior and attempts to manipulate the court have always led to abuse of a dominant position, or other insider trading. Real-time electronic finance has not made it possible to regulate these deviant, disloyal and illicit behaviors. Would electronic information, centralized by news agencies such as AFP and PressWire, suffer the same fate?
Finance as an example
The Stock Exchange Code defines the offense of price manipulation as follows:
“The offense of price manipulation consists of massively buying or selling a security with the aim of starting or stopping a trend in the value of the security. »
Criminal law defines insider trading in these terms:
“Constitutes insider trading the fact, with full knowledge of the facts and for a person having privileged information, of making use of it by realizing, for himself or for others, either directly or indirectly, or several transactions or by canceling or modifying one or several orders. »
In the world of the media, insider trading would simply consist of a time lag of information, or its modification, from which those who use it benefit. The availability of stock market prices in real time (AFP) has not made it possible to resolve information asymmetries, nor the opportunities to have information before others, from which only some benefit.
And general information
As a result, when journalists relay information en masse without having checked it, potentially marred by errors, whether intentional or not – a phenomenon that is all the more accentuated when the media are subsidized by the State, or when the revenues depend on advertisers – aren’t these journalists guilty of insider trading towards the public?
It seems that this is a manipulation of the course of information, if not maliciously, in every respect against the Munich Charter.
And it’s not Coluche who will contradict me: Journalists do not believe politicians’ lies, but they repeat them. It’s worse ! »
Let’s try to analyze this trend as objectively as possible.
All of us, who claim to inform citizens, how do we proceed with regard to the factual elements of which we have not acquired knowledge by ourselves (primarily via our own investigations, the testimonies that we collect personally and the inquiries opinions produced by us)?
We rely on dispatches from Agence France Presse (AFP), a state body. And after knowing what is sort of the official course of information, we put it back on the market in our own way. Now, making use of opinion, one achieves an incremental rotation, a pivot of truth. And as we saw in “It Matters,” the content of information can vary dramatically depending on the angle from which it is presented.
A bit like a navigator who, mistaking himself by a few degrees (barely or more) with each measurement he takes on the compass, inevitably ends up in a completely different port than the correct one, this variation in the exact content of the information, is all the more important, amplified, when the information is reproduced many times, always thus somewhat ” offbeat ».
Yes. like journalists mainstream look at each other and follow each other from the AFP dispatch, so there is a “surcharge”. They construct products derived from basic information, create what might be called information subprimes (‘ subinformations ») : synthetic information, created from unverified data, from opinions.
This is called taking the tangent. Here again, I would like to quote Coluche: On TV, you can’t tell the truth: there are too many people watching. »
Returning to our stock market example, note that trader Nick Leeson brought Baring Bank to its knees; not to say on the ground. And the question still arises whether he did it without his leaders understanding what was going on, or whether they let him do it?
In comparison, I ask myself this one concerning journalistic insider trading. This practice ” of state “, unfortunately not reprehensible” as is ”, to which the media engage mainstream : Could the repeated lies and failings of certain journalists bring media like L’Express or Le Monde to its knees?
Collusion or incompetence, it seems that a journalist can bring a media to its knees, with or without the complacency of its editor.
And if this journalist is under the influence of his publication director, he operates a double violation of the Munich Charter: he respects neither duty number 1 (to tell the truth whatever the cost), nor number 10 (n to be subservient to anyone).
For these reasons, it would be fair, I believe, to give them all insider trading every time.
And probably to create an independent media authority to regulate that.