French media landscape: Subsidies, soft-centered journalism

The British Spectator has analyzed the French media industry and demonstrated how the government in Paris has led to the demolishing of journalistic independence and objectivity. Caliber.Az reprints this article.

"It’s not surprising that much mainstream French journalism is complacent, incurious and stenographic. The elite French media is lavishly subsidised and the torrent of handouts makes tenuous any claim that mainstream French journalism is independent.

The most compromised are the broadcasters. Indeed there’s little pretence that they offer more than token auditing of the government. Three billion euros annually goes to French state-owned radio and television stations [which are allowed to top this up selling advertising]. The French TV license was abolished so the money is paid directly by the state.

There’s a gossamer-thin pretence, through various state consultative committees, that the state broadcasters are accountable to viewers and listeners – but they’re not really. The state broadcasters know who calls the tune. Hundreds of millions more go to the newspapers in direct subsidies and tax privileges, accounting for almost a quarter of the revenue of the press.

The French government claims its media subsidies are to guarantee pluralism but many recipients of state largesse are immensely rich plutocrats while pluralism in practice has mostly defaulted to a smug, narrow, Parisian, leftist groupthink. Real reporting is something the French media has largely abandoned and in the provinces, where local newspaper monopolies stand firm, it’s scandalous. I have been reading the Midi-Libre newspaper for more than 20 years and have yet to encounter the slightest interest in the conflicted conduct of certain local politicians.

Those unsubsidised journals and websites that dare to move the permissible limits of discussion ever so slightly to the right are immediately denounced as extremists and a danger to democracy. This is vividly demonstrated by the elite Parisian media attempt to demonise the unsubsidised right-of-centre CNEWS, currently the leading news station.

The recent feeble prime-time interview of President Emmanuel Macron in which he essentially ignored his interviewers sitting like numpties was a classic example of French television at its worst. Not one of the president’s assertions was challenged, even his claim that Operation Barkhane, the catastrophic French counter-terrorism operation in Mali, had been ‘a success’.

Not only are the broadcasters and publishers in France showered with other people’s money but individual, licensed journalists also nibble at the trough, enjoying a unique ‘niche fiscale’ in which a €7,650 [£6,600] slice of their income is entirely untaxed. This might be considered state aid to a failing profession but don’t worry because the nifty French have engineered a ‘cultural exception’ to normal EU rules.

The French Senate reports total public support for the press was €367 million [£319 million] in 2021. That’s essentially €1 million [£865,000] a day. Much of it ended up in the pockets of billionaires.

In addition to payments made to publishers for every paper sold – a charming conceit as the media digitises – the government hands out funds for modernisation and to subsidise physical distribution of newspapers and magazines. Even the New York Times, which prints a Paris edition, has had its hand in the cookie jar. It was a pitiful sum, but really. Have they no shame?

France does not boast one global digital media giant. The French excuse the failure as a question of language. But that’s nonsense. TikTok was created by the Chinese. Underwriting legacy players, backing losers, is how it done here and is simply a recipe for stagnation.

In addition to these diverse sums, millions more is paid to La Poste for its press distribution mission – in which taxpayers subsidise the physical distribution of newspapers. Millions more of taxpayer money goes into local newspapers that daily publish pages of public procurement announcements that could easily be made available free on the internet.

The government is also a heavy advertiser on TV and in the press. It’s hard to calculate how much is spent but very little of it goes to media that don’t tow the line. Dissident CNEWS gets nothing, as far as I can see.

Another indirect aid is tax expenditure, reports Acrimed, the Paris-based media observatory. This will have amounted to around €161 million [£138 million] in 2021. It includes the ‘super-reduced’ VAT rate on periodicals of 2.1 per cent and tax privileges for licensed journalists holding an official press card.
Excluding tax expenditure, aid to the press represented 21.4 per cent of the sector’s turnover, Acrimed estimates. How can any media be independent that is so dependent on the largesse of the state?

The Ministry of Culture says that in 2021, 431 titles received state aid. The newspaper that received the most was the tabloid called Le Parisen in Paris and Aujourd’hui en France in the provinces: €13,520,000 [£11,730,000]. The paper is owned by Bernard Arnault, France’s richest man. Next comes centrist Le Figaro owned by Groupe Dassault, the arms manufacturer, with €7.7 million [£6.7 million]; Libération, the French analog of The Guardian with €6.7 million [£5.8 million], and Le Monde, the quintessential leftist establishment paper, €5.9 million [£5.1 million]. The communist party paper L’Humanité, which sells 30,000 copies daily, got €5.1 million [£4.4 million] – about €170 [£147] for every devoted reader.

Clientelist media is the inevitable consequence of these subsidies and sadly the phenomenon is not limited to France. Germany offered almost €200 million [£174 million] to its leading newspapers to assist with their digital transition, a project that was dropped before it could advance so far. The digital transition that British and American newspapers paid for themselves. The left-wing alternative Die Tageszeitung newspaper, which has spent most of its 42-year existence on the brink of financial ruin, calls this, properly, ‘dirty money from the state’.

The EU is piling in too with numerous funding streams to support ‘media freedom and pluralism’ including ‘collaboration and innovation’, and ‘citizen engagement’ although so far without direct handouts to the media. In Canada, the Trudeau government has poured $595 million [£355 million] into its media bail-out program, which funds media organisations using a cluster of tax credits and subsidies. That’s in addition to the billion-dollar subsidy for the CBC.

New Zealand has launched a $55 million [£27 million] fund of its own. Ireland is heading that way. ‘State support for journalism is in the public interest,’ says the Irish Times, its begging bowl outstretched.

It is surely not entirely coincidental that the more the media feeds at the trough, the more it can ignore the interests of readers, to focus on the wokish preoccupations of the affluent, urbane left. It could be argued that this is true, too, in Britain. The BBC, which takes £3.8 billion a year from its captive rent payers, is a perfect example. But at least in Britain the unruly press has to fend for itself.

French media companies claim that their independence isn’t threatened at all by their dependence on handouts. Canadian hacks say the same. The evidence is that awash in unearned income, none will bite the hand that feeds them. Which is why much of the French media is soft-centered and the media in Germany, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand is heading the same way".