InvestigationProducers and advertisers fear that the merger of the two main private audiovisual groups will unbalance competition and defenders of pluralism are alarmed, while another media giant is forming behind businessman Vincent Bolloré.
It had been nearly an hour, Friday, January 28, that Nicolas de Tavernost explained to the senators gathered in a commission of inquiry into the concentration of the media to what extent the merger of TF1 and M6 was in his eyes of the“evidence”, when the septuagenarian made himself solemn. “Those who would refuse this consolidation would be taking a great risk for the French audiovisual sector”, he warned, as if it were his life. And the one who has been running the M6 group for thirty-five years to cut in person the Gordian knot that “Newborn” – the code name adopted to designate the future together – submits to the sword of the legislator, the Competition Authority and the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority (Arcom, ex-CSA): “There are no risks” to validate the union of the first two French commercial channels, he assured.
Not so fast, however, continue to respond to him producers, advertisers, and defenders of pluralism, for a year that this industrial project was revealed. The subject is all the more sensitive since, at the same time, Vivendi, the parent company of Canal+ as well as Editis and its fifty or so publishing houses, is pursuing a major concentration movement. In the role of the ogre suspected of nurturing a project as ideological as it is industrial, and after having pecked at the magazines of Prisma Media (Capital, Current wife, Gala, etc.), Vincent Bolloré, Vivendi’s largest shareholder, is preparing to launch a takeover bid for Lagardère (Hachette Livre, Europe 1, The Sunday newspaper, Paris Match).
The economic power of the two future behemoths, their stranglehold on the “available brain time” of the French, makes it necessary to reread the rules of pluralism at work since the law relating to the freedom of communication of 1986. At the time, “the number of television channels could be counted on the fingers of one hand”, recalls Roch-Olivier Maistre, the president of Arcom. “Today, there are 30 channels on DTT (240 in all), and more than 1,000 radio and web radio stations”, alongside which YouTube channels and audiovisual platforms thrive. Is the rise to power of Vincent Bolloré and the owner of TF1, Martin Bouygues, legitimate or will it stifle the French ecosystem and undermine pluralism?
A regulation to review
A sign that the regulations need to be reviewed, Vincent Bolloré is preparing to control hertzian television channels (C8 and CNews), a generalist radio (Europe 1), and newspapers (The JDD and Paris Match). He was able to expand his empire by circumventing the 1986 law and the “two out of three” rule, which prohibits the same owner from owning a national TV, a national radio and a national daily. The device had been imagined to avoid the expansion of magnates like the papivore of the years 1970-1980, Robert Hersant. Except that she only mentions the dailies. Thirty years later, the JDD and Paris Match – both weekly –, which make and break the careers of politicians, have an influence at least as considerable as Le Figaro Where The world. Another concern, CNews, supposed to be a news channel, does not provide “the pluralism of currents of thought and opinion” imposed on him by his convention.
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