With just a few days to go until the second round of the presidential election between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, the French Coalition for Cultural Diversity is alarmed about the future of public broadcasting.
While culture has been largely absent from the debates of this campaign, the threats to the future of public service broadcasting have never been so present.
In this respect, Marine Le Pen’s plan to abolish public broadcasting would be a political, democratic and cultural aberration. Indeed, the privatisation of public service broadcasting companies would jeopardise the pluralism of the audiovisual and information landscape at a time when false information and disinformation are rife. Worse still, it would be a disaster for the diversity of programmes available to the public, even though the public service channels and radio stations demonstrate an undeniable ambition and uniqueness. Finally, this ideological project would deal a major blow to cultural diversity, as the public service is a historic and central partner of French and European creation, authors, artists and all cultural professionals.
Public broadcasting is clearly one of the essential vectors of cultural diversity that must be protected from such a dismantling project.
Giving it the means to survive, to fulfil its missions and to develop in order to win over new audiences, to invest in diverse creation and to deploy its offer on all media also requires guaranteeing it, as in all the major European countries that have modernised their audiovisual licence fee, sustainable, autonomous and earmarked funding.
Beyond the campaign announcements, and in particular the abolition of the licence fee, which has worried all those who are attached to public service, the Coalition therefore calls on Emmanuel Macron to commit to proposing such specific and sustainable funding in order to ensure its future and protect its independence.
Finally, the Coalition would like to firmly reiterate that the future of a free public broadcasting service, whose funding must guarantee its independence and high standards, is a cultural, democratic and republican issue of the utmost importance.
Press contact for France:
Agnès Mazet – 01 40 23 45 11 – agnes.mazet@sacd.fr
Press contact for international:
Guillaume Prieur – contact@coalitionfrancaise.org – www.coalitionfrancaise.org