Conference on the impartiality of public audiovisuel: Introductory remarks by Martin Ajdari

Check against delivery

Mr Vice-Chairman, dear Bruno Lasserre,

Members of Parliament,

Ladies and Gentlemen of the public and private audiovisuel sectors

Madam Managing Director,

Members of the College,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

dear friends,

I am delighted to welcome you to Arcom today to discuss the impartiality of the public audiovisual industry, a public audiovisual industry represented today by France Télévisions, Radio France, France Médias Monde - whose presidents I welcome, as well as their colleague from LCP-AN, and representatives of other components of the public audiovisual industry, who are certainly not indifferent to this issue, even if they fall within the competence of Arcom.

There are three points I'd like to make to introduce the work we're about to present to you: firstly, the singularity of public audiovisual and its relationship with the French people; secondly, the singularity of our relationship, as regulator, with public audiovisual; and thirdly, the particular issues raised by the notion of impartiality.

1. Public audiovisuel is a common good, and we are all, in a way, its children. Public audiovisuel is one of the pillars of our democratic functioning, our cultural model and our social cohesion. It's never a pointless reminder.

Its channels (and increasingly, its digital supplies) play an essential role in guaranteeing plurality, alongside private groups, in organizing the confrontation and circulation of ideas, and in providing public access to a wide variety of programs of general interest which, by their very nature, cannot find a place in the economic model of private channels.

When it comes to news and current affairs, an editorial field that lies at the heart of the question of impartiality (even if it does not exhaust it), public broadcasters play a decisive role: they account for a third of total expenditure in France, i.e. nearly €1 billion, including more than half of local news and current affairs expenditure. Public broadcasters made a major contribution to the last municipal election campaign, with over 300 hours of election-related programming on the Ici and France 3 networks. And I don't need to stress the role and presence of France Médias Monde on every continent.

In their ability to convince the public, the public broadcasters have proved their worth, maintaining their high standards and audiences, while asking less of the taxpayer - some 20% less over 10 years, if inflation is taken into account. An effort that has undoubtedly not been sufficiently emphasized.

The debate on the overall level of funding and the precise scope of public service broadcasting is not illegitimate, given the current budgetary situation and the abundance of private supply (at least in quantitative terms). But one thing is certain: public broadcasting must be able to rely on sufficient and predictable financial resources to carry out its missions, and this is a requirement of the European regulation on freedom of the media.

If viewers and listeners are very attached to the public audiovisual service, they are also legitimately demanding of it: belonging to all, and financed by all, it must both stand out for its exemplarity and the specificity of its supply, and at the same time address all and play a unifying role, in a society that is polarizing and fragmenting. Expectations are high, and are a clear invitation to continuous improvement, a quest to which we know you are fully committed, Ladies Presidents.

The recent commission of inquiry into public audiovisuel, through its chairman and rapporteur, put forward numerous proposals of various kinds - some of them interesting - to improve the way the channels operate and how they are perceived by the French.

Personally, I regret that their content was not the subject of more in-depth discussion during the work of the commission of inquiry. And in terms of form, its tone - too often accusatory, even inquisitorial - was hardly conducive to a calm collective reflection on what we want to do together with our public audiovisuel.

The studies presented this morning on impartiality, as an indication of how the French perceive "their" public audiovisual service, which is the ultimate objective of the editorial proposition of these services, will, I hope, bring a little objectivity to this general climate.

2. Like all French people, the regulator also has a special relationship with public service broadcasting, over and above compliance with the rules common to all channels:

• Firstly, the law entrusts it with the task of appointing, with complete transparency and independence, the heads of France Télévisions, Radio France and France Médias Monde,
• Secondly, it is responsible for monitoring the performance of each of these companies, which is the subject of an annual report presented to Parliament;
• Third and last mission: guaranteeing the independence and impartiality of the audiovisuel public service, as set out in article 3-1 of the 86 law, whose 40th anniversary we will soon be celebrating.

And it is precisely collective expectations in terms of impartiality that bring us together today, expectations and sometimes frustrations expressed by citizens or their representatives with regard to all institutions, in particular those with an arbitrator role (the judiciary... and also the audiovisuel regulator, which is no exception), but also those that act as intermediaries (this is true of the French education system, and therefore also of public audiovisuel - the "grande école de la République", as Jean-Paul Cluzel once called Radio France).

3. As far as the impartiality of public audiovisuel is concerned, although it has been enshrined in law since 1989, its scope clearly required clarification, and this is my final point.

What does the law say? That Arcom guarantees the independence and impartiality of the public audiovisual industry. But since the end of the ORTF, and particularly since the 1980s, media and political attention has focused on the 1st of these two notions, independence, on recurrent suspicions of executive intervention, and on the means to protect public television and radio from it (through funding or appointment procedures).

For a long time, the requirement for impartiality, the sister of independence, went unheeded - and there was no specific demand for its implementation.

This need was finally formalized at the Estates General de l'Information (EGI) in 2024, one of whose working groups summoned the strengthening of this requirement - in the sense of objective, contextualized treatment of information - and pleaded to improve its effectiveness, mentioning the British model of due impartiality.

By taking a closer look at Arcom, since the beginning of 2025, then under particular tension in September with the disclosure of excerpts from videos that have caused much ink to flow, we first felt it necessary to clarify the meaning of this obligation of impartiality and the conditions for its concrete verification.

Firstly, its meaning, because it seemed necessary to clarify its semantic and deontological scope in relation to that of the concepts of objectivity, rigor, neutrality and plurality (especially since 2024 and the new Conseil d'Etat case law on internal pluralism); and to distinguish this obligation, which is specific to public audiovisual media, from those which apply to all audiovisual media.

Secondly, the conditions under which it is carried out, since there were no shared, formalized rules or proceedings, either in the specifications, in the internal workings of the channels, or in the regulation carried out by Arcom.

Yet the questions raised by these specifications are numerous and thorny:

How can impartiality be defined, measured and assessed in the public audiovisuel sector?

What processes and rules are needed to ensure impartiality?

How does it apply to news, but also to other program categories?

How does it apply to outside productions, or to the duty of reserve of employees under private law employment contracts, but with a public service mission?

To help us answer all these questions, last autumn we asked Bruno Lasserre, Honorary Vice-President of the Conseil d'État and former Chairman of the Competition Authority, to conduct an in-depth study, the conclusions of which are presented to you today.

For the purposes of his mission, Bruno Lasserre, ably assisted by Thomas Odinot, Maître des requêtes at the Conseil d'Etat, has been working over the last few months with the companies concerned, who have been able to present to him their own thoughts and initiatives on the issue.

He also met a number of researchers and academics, and visited the United Kingdom to take a closer look at the British example. Today, he has submitted a report with 17 proposals, which we are making public, as we announced at the outset.

I believe that this work answers all the questions we had asked ourselves, and on behalf of the Arcom Board I would like to warmly thank Bruno Lasserre for having put his eminent skills and extraordinary experience at the service of this delicate mission, where the law blends with philosophy, but also with editorial and operational reality.

Before he presents his conclusions, we'd like to take 15 minutes to present the main findings of the quantitative and qualitative study that Arcom conducted, with the help of Toluna/Harris Interactive and ThinkOut, to feed the mission's reflections. We felt it was essential to include the views of the French in our reflections: it is to them that public audiovisuel must be impartial, and it is to them and the elected representatives who represent them that it must be accountable.

I'd like to hand over to Bruno Schmutz, Arcom's Director of Research, to present these results, before Bruno Lasserre takes the floor.

After a few concluding words, Bruno Lasserre and I, assisted if need be by members of the Arcom board, will answer any questions you may have.