The French newspaper press is in danger-or so it says. It may really be in danger of having to do something about its current condition. But its first reaction is to ask the government for help.
A flurry of demands has been addressed these past weeks from the grand personages of the press to the president and the prime minister. Yves de Chaisemartin, head of the Hersant group which includes the daily Figaro, wrote last month to Alain Jupp? on behalf of his fellow press bosses, asking if the government still had "the will to preserve a pluralist, independent daily press." In the same month, Bernard Porte, head of Bayard press and the president of the National Federation of the French press, wrote in La Croix, under the headline "Put out the fire!", that the survival of many newspapers was now in doubt.
The government is exciting the anger not just of the leftish dailies such as Le Monde and Lib?ration-both of which have been hard hit financially over the past decade-but also the traditionally prosperous regional newspapers, for many the preferred choice over the Parisian dailies. These newspapers tend towards the right. Jacques Chirac launched his campaign for the presidency in 1994 not in a national newspaper, but in La Voix du Nord.
The relations between the regional press and the right are in fact stiflingly close. The annual party given by the Union of the Daily Regional Press at the beginning of every political season has, for the past two years, had both the president and the prime minister in attendance. This year, Chirac and Jupp? used the occasion to lament loudly that the national press was now aiming at nothing less than the destabilisation of the government, and was exercising a negative influence on the morale of the nation. It was denigrating the political class through so-called exposures of erring politicians-even the rightwing Figaro did not escape a whipping. Only the sports and business papers were excepted from their strictures-and, of course, the sound and sensible regional press.
But the amity did not last. In a recent editorial in La Nouvelle R?publique du Centre-Ouest, the president of the regional union, Jacques Saint-Cricq, claimed that the government was driven by a "conscious wish to damage the newspapers." His director general, Jean Viansson-Pont?, spoke in October of deep bitterness in relations between press and government and an "unprecedented economic crisis of the press."
The French press-as the British and American papers often remind us-is a dependent one. It enjoys a continuing range of subsidies from the government, targeted especially at those newspapers which have little advertising (one of the pleasures of reading Le Monde is the large number of pages which are only text). It is relieved of the standard postage rate. And journalists got tax breaks of 30 per cent, which allowed for lower nominal wages.
But this is changing. The tax breaks were abolished, sparking off protest strikes by journalists in early 1996. After tortuous negotiations, still continuing, the postal rates are likely to rise by 50 per cent over the next five years. And the commercial television channels have been allowed to carry more advertising, which will mean a drop in the advertising revenue going to the press.
These privileges are sneered at by us Anglo-Saxons, but they have an honourable source: the re-establishment of a democratic and pluralist press after the war. This was a duty shouldered by the French state which recognised there was no chance for a commercially viable diverse press. The privileges became engrained, as privileges do. Now they are being dismantled-at a time when the government is itself unpopular, as resentment against its economic policies grows and a wave of corruption allegations are being more vigorously pursued than has been the newspaper habit in the past.
The old order is shifting, and as ever it brings pain, but not enough for profitability. The French dislike of foreign ownership of strategic assets (see the rejection of the sale of part of the Thomson group to Daewoo) has meant that there has been no large injection of capital from international media groups. Of the leading dailies, only Les Echos, the main business paper, is foreign owned (by the Pearson Group, which owns the Financial Times).
There is no equivalent to the grinding competition for market share which marks the British press, and which sees daily struggles between the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, The Times and the Telegraph, the Sun and the Mirror. The French regional papers are usually effective monopolies. The Parisian dailies serve particular constituencies. Their language prohibits them from engaging in global competition, as the FT does with the Wall Street Journal and the Herald Tribune.
The Anglo-Saxon critique has some force, and the government's own actions will dictate some Anglo- Saxon attitudes. But the only way out is to court capital to fill the gap being left by the state. That, as we Anglo-Saxons know, is not without large costs: for every Pearson Group and Rothermere content to let editors edit, there are more (and more powerful) Murdochs and, worse, Maxwells whose influence is heavier. Partial freedom is our common heritage. But whingeing to a government whose hands are more used to being kissed is no longer a solution.n
