Do you trust the news media? Since 1987, the French daily newspaper La Croix
has asked that question each year by means of a survey undertaken by Kantar. And each year the results are similar, even though they vary slightly. Less than half of the people polled consider that “things really happened or almost happened” as reported by the media. The fault lies with the media themselves, since most of the respondents believe that journalists are subject to pressure from the rich and powerful. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that many new media, to counter this belief, emphasise, in addition to their unique editorial line, their commitment to journalistic ethics, their decision to rely on subscriptions rather than on advertising and a closer relationship with their readers.
This context shows that, even though the issue has been with us for more than a century, the question of media independence is still worthy of attention today. Recent upheavals in the information ecosystem, marked in particular by new waves of economic concentration and the unavoidable power of large digital platforms and their algorithms, have not improved the economic situation of most media, nor the working conditions of journalists or the public’s perception of the information thus produced. On the contrary, since the criticism, often justified, which has been levelled at the media in recent decades by social science researchers and civil society, has recently been compounded by increasingly virulent attacks from angry citizens, industrialists and elected officials alike, even to the highest levels of government. Yet democracy cannot exist without free media. How then can we solve this equation? How do the news media view the issue of independence at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
The ambition of this book is to present recent research on media independence by French-speaking researchers. All the contributions are from the information and communication sciences and have already been published in well-known journals or collective works, except one which is an unpublished chapter of work to obtain a habilitation thesis. They thus bear witness to a dynamic field of research, which over the past twenty years or so, has profoundly renewed media studies in the French-speaking world. It would have been impossible to bring together in a single book all the fields covered by this research, which also includes, without limitation, the socio-economics of media organisations (stakeholder strategies, professional practices and information diversity), the morphology of journalism professions (changes in professions, conditions of work for journalists), media representations of events and social identities (changes in media content and forms linked to gender, class and race issues) and the media as arenas for public debate (construction of public issues, relationship with sources and the public, the democratic role of media). An overview of this research can be found in Fleury
and Walter (2014) and Walter et al. (2018).
The choice of the media independence theme was both a necessity and an opportunity. A vital necessity for the media, because the deep economic crisis they are facing cannot be resolved without a thorough reflection on the importance of media independence and the forces that jeopardise it. It is an opportunity for research, because independence is less a concept as such than the result of various intersecting issues. This is why this book approaches it from three interrelated and complementary perspectives: the economy, the relationship to media readers and the political context.
In the first part, devoted to the media economy, Franck Rebillard begins by recalling the multiple ways in which media are financed in France. In the light of declining advertising revenues, fluctuations in government subsidies, declining printed press readership and uncertainties in online media financing, how can sustainable business models be developed? Above all, how can we ensure the viability of the media while making secure that the origin of funds will not influence editorial choices and information quality? Crowdfunding often appears to be an obvious solution, and it has now become commonplace in France. However, Loïc Ballarini, Emmanuel Marty and Nikos Smyrnaios show that, while it is useful for launching or saving media that are financially independent of powerful industry, it seems to be reserved for niche media for which it is unable to provide all the financing. Although the context is similar in Quebec, the analysis of Anne-Marie Brunelle and Michel Sénécal shows that crowdfunding is less used there, being integrated into community practices that have long been based on the search for alternative financing.
However, achieving financial profitability is not an objective in itself. Information is certainly a commodity, which can be bought and sold in a very competitive market, but its importance in the democratic game makes it a unique product. It cannot exist without the trust of the public to whom it is addressed. This trust can be built in different ways. In the case of revolutionary left-wing media, which Vincent Goulet examines from an historical and anthropological perspective, it is possible for media to gather considerable audiences when they succeed in embodying the latent desires of their respective audiences. More than a century ago, French regional dailies and weeklies chose another path. Loïc Ballarini points out that by defining their editorial lines around a consensus these newspapers were able to develop flourishing local monopolies, which are now being challenged. The French regional press has indeed moved so far away from the daily reality of its readers that it can no longer convince them to read it. By examining the media coverage of a local environmental controversy in eastern France, Marieke Stein also shows that the role of the local press in public debate can vary according to political, economic and ideological constraints. In the case of online media, relations with the public are constructed via comments, which raise the question of how to moderate them. In a pioneering chapter on the subject, Emmanuel Marty and Nikos Smyrnaios analyse the links between the economic, technical and editorial aspects of commentary moderation on the one hand, and the quality and diversity of the information thus produced on the other.
Ultimately, the independence of the news media depends, of course, on the political context in which they operate. Recent research has shed new light on Arabic-speaking countries and a chapter offers a unique overview of these issues. Tourya Guaaybess shows how, since the 1980s, the transnationalisation of information production and dissemination has led to a transformation of the Arab media landscape, to the benefit of the Gulf countries and at Egypt’s expense. The result is new geopolitics of information, combined with new professional practices and profiles of journalists. The specificities of four countries are then analysed. For Morocco, Abdelfettah Benchenna and Dominique Marchetti have investigated the way in which the field of power has tried, since the 1990s, to dominate the media while using methods that are less openly repressive than before and therefore less likely to be criticised by international organisations. For Algeria, Cherif Dris has observed similar changes in which the government practices deregulation while remaining the “invisible hand” that keeps the media under control, thanks in particular to the lack of professionalism of journalists. Enrique Klaus and Olivier Koch describe how in Tunisia after the Arab Spring, the political domination of private media was weakened both by the transition from print media to digital media and by an economic context experienced as a crisis by its main actors. Finally, for Egypt, Bachir Benaziz takes a socio-historical approach to trace the emergence of a new place of information production since the 1990s. After decades of state press dominance, the emergence of private media must be closely linked to the political and social changes experienced by the country, as well as to the careers and ambitions of the businessmen who are increasingly taking over the information sector.
References
- Fleury, B., & Walter, J. (Eds.). (2014). État des recherches en SIC sur l’information médiatique. Revue française des Sciences de l’information et de la communication, 5, https://journals.openedition.org/rfsic/992.
- Walter, J., Douyère, D., Bouillon, J.-L., & Ollivier-Yaniv, C. (Eds.). (2018). Dynamiques des recherches en sciences de l’information et de la communication, CPDirSIC, http://cpdirsic.fr/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/dynamiques-des-recherches-sic-web-180919.pdf.