Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-19
Source: The Conversation – France in French (3)– By Nathalie Sonnac, Professor of Information and Communication Sciences, University Paris-Panthéon-Assas The Alloncle report reasons within the framework inherited from the last century (channels, airtime, editorial obligations). However, digital platforms have profoundly reconfigured the informational space.
How can we envision the future of public broadcasting in this unprecedented context? The highly controversialparliamentary reporton public broadcasting raises a simple question: how to reform French public broadcasting?
After several months of hearings with deputies, channel executives, journalists, producers, and regulators around three themes (neutrality, operation, and financing), it draws a severe assessment: editorial biases, failures in pluralism, flawed governance, excessive costs, inefficient organization.
Proposed are a rationalization of channels, strengthening of controls, as well as massive restructurings and savings. One of the problemsabout this report is that it is already obsolete, as it was built on a blind spot.
It identifies certain internal malfunctions but remains largely blind to the systemic transformations that are redefining today the very role of public broadcasting. It continues to reason within a framework largely inherited from the 20th centuryeThe century of: channels, airtime, editorial obligations, and the pluralism of broadcasting stations.
However, the center of gravity of the information system has shifted.
The actors who today massively structure access to information are no longer primarily television channels or public radios, but the major digital platforms that organize the visibility of content, prioritize information, guide the flows of attention, and determine what circulates in the public space.
Can we propose a comprehensive overhaul of public broadcasting without taking into account the profound changes in the informational space? The question is no longer just: “Do the media fulfill their obligations?” It becomes: “Under what conditions is public opinion now formed?” The attention economy This is where economic analysis becomes essential.
The report places a lot of emphasis on the costs of public broadcasting, but much less on the economic models that are transforming the flow of information. Yet, this is where a decisive part of the democratic problem is at stake.
Digital platforms are based onmodels based on capturing attention. Their primary objective is not to produce reliable or pluralistic information, but to maximize engagement: clicks, reactions, comments, time spent. This economic logic profoundly changes the incentives to produce information.
It favors emotional, polarizing, simplified, spectacular content, to the detriment of more complex, nuanced, or costly formats to produce. In this new environment, thethe media themselves are transforming under constraint. Competition is no longer only between public and private channels, but among all content producers seeking to capture a resource that has become scarce: available attention.
Information then enters an economy of visibility dominated by virality. The parliamentary report mentions social networks, new uses, or the fragmentation of audiences, but these elements remain peripheral in its reasoning. The platforms appear as a mere context: however, they have become the core of the informational ecosystem.
This mutation profoundly changes thequestion of pluralism. For a long time, pluralism mainly consisted of ensuring a diversity of political currents and opinions in the media. Today, the issue is broader. What is at stake is no longer just who speaks, but what is made visible.The algorithms prioritizethe content according to their capacity to hold attention.
They create effects of focus, amplification, and sometimes radicalization. It is in this context that the rise of fake news, the polarization of public debate, and information fatigue must be understood. The problem does not lie solely in journalistic errors or editorial biases, but in an entire informational environment structured by permanent influence dynamics.
We are not in a democracy deprived of freedom. We are in a democracy where the very conditions for the formation of opinion are transformed by largely invisible economic, technical, and algorithmic mechanisms: a democracy under influence.
Why information cannot be left to market forces alone This transformation weakens traditional media and above all calls into question the very conditions of producing information of general interest. Information is not an economic good like others.
Its social value far exceeds its market value. A long investigation, an international report, local coverage, or fact-checking work produce collective effects that exceed their immediate profitability: understanding the world, civic participation, circulation of common references, the ability to debate democratically.
However, the market does not spontaneously guarantee the production of these contents. Long formats, costly, not very viral or weakly monetizable are precisely those that platform logics tend to marginalize. Competition is therefore not symmetrical.
Public service media continue to fulfill missions of verification, territorial coverage, cultural production, or investigation in an environment where platforms capture the majority of advertising growth without bearing the same obligations. Public broadcasting is therefore not just one actor among others in the media landscape.
Itrepresents a democratic infrastructureintended to correct the failings of a market which, left to itself, produces neither sufficient pluralism, nor quality information accessible to all, nor a common public space. What concrete reforms to adapt the public audiovisual service?
Recognizing the democratic role of public service does not mean defending the status quo. The challenge is not only to correct malfunctions, but to give it the means to face the attention economy and the new digital architectures.
Public broadcasting must be reformed to confront this environment, not to disappear within it. Part of its weakening stems first from the hesitations and contradictions of the shareholder state itself. For several years, public resources have been weakened even though they represent the bulk of the financing of France Télévisions.
The latestreport of the Court of Auditorsmentions a severe deterioration of the group’s equity and a particularly worrying cash situation. The cause is identified: scheduled reduction of public allocations, lack of lasting visibility, and late anticipation of the seriousness of the situation.
Reforming such a central actor without securing the conditions of its funding further weakens an already strained structure. But financial difficulties alone do not explain everything.
The internal functioning remains marked by arigid organizationÂ: compartmentalized mapping of 160 professions which makes versatility difficult and complicates skill development, salary progression linked to seniority which mechanically increases the payroll even when staff numbers decrease, as well as the existence of social provisions inherited from the past (benefits in kind, specific schemes, organizational rules) that limit productivity gains.
The fragmented governance generates about 17% duplication of support functions according to theIGF reportor the adoption of deep strategic reforms. Yet this is what most European democracies (Belgium, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, Finland, or Switzerland) have done by grouping their public audiovisual services.
This is also what is recommended by the”Support mission for the creation of a France Médias holding company”, led by the former director of Radio France antennas and France Inter, Laurence Bloch in 2025.
Moreover, public broadcasting must imperatively win over young audiences and play a central role in media and information education (MIE). Arte has shown that a public media outlet can reach a young audience thanks to a demanding digital strategy.
This requires massive investments in short formats, interactive content, and real-time verification tools. In a saturated, polarized, and algorithm-driven informational space, citizens’ ability to distinguish fact from opinion, to identify manipulation, and to understand how information is produced has become an ordinary condition of citizenship.
In 2026,nearly 41% of the Frenchdeclared using social networks, influencers, and artificial intelligence tools to get information on political news. The issue of media education can no longer be marginal; it concerns the conditions for forming democratic judgment.
Engagement must be structural: a dedicated unit within the holding company, linked to the national education system, responsible for producing educational content, decoding tools, and training for all audiences, including students, adults, and seniors.
The challenge is not only to preserve existing channels or structures, but to maintain, in a landscape fragmented by algorithms and polarized by opinion channels, a space where the citizen is not reduced to a profile, a target, or a consumer of emotions.
The consumption of programs in a non-linear way (streaming) will become the norm for audiovisual content consumption. A single platform for all public audiovisual productions would contribute to a common information space. The reform announced by the president of France Télévisions, Delphine Ernotte Cunci, on May 12″streaming first”is perhaps the first stone of this new building.
Reforming public broadcasting is a societal choice, that of deciding that democracy needs a common information space and that it is essential to act accordingly. And that’s where one of themajor ambiguitiesfrom the Alloncle report.
It deconstructs the legitimacy of a system, while affirming that it must be maintained.
The announced billion in savings is mainly based on a reduction in the scope of the public service (in terms of offerings, costs, and organization) with the bet that this contraction will not affect its missions.
This is a fragile point in the reasoning. Weakening public service: a democratic risk One does not protect a democracy by weakening its defenses. Public broadcasting is one of them: not the only one, but an essential barrier that organizes everyone’s access to information that must be verified, independent from commercial interests and political pressures.
If public broadcasting were to disappear, the market would not fill the gap. It would reorganize it according to its own logic. Information would become a product entirely subject to the imperatives of audience and profitability.
The least attractive territories would be the least covered. Expensive formats (long investigations, international reports, local presence) would be the first to be sacrificed. Polarization would increase. And the citizens most vulnerable to misinformation would be the most exposed.
This hypothesis is not abstract. One year before a presidential election, political forces have made the dismantling of public broadcasting aassumed objective. Meanwhile, digital platforms continue to reshape the informational space without truly being held accountable for the democratic effects of their algorithms.
The disappearance of the public audiovisual servicewould not be a simple budget adjustment. It would constitute a democratic setback – silent, gradual, perhaps irreversible. Nathalie Sonnac is the author of Who wants the public audiovisual sector dead? at the Observatoire editions, 2026.
Nathalie Sonnac is also a member of the Republic Laboratory –ref.
Public Audiovisual: the Alloncle report ignores the transformation of the informational space. How to respond to it?https://theconversation.com/audiovisuel-public-le-rapport-alloncle-ignore-la-transformation-de-lespace-informationnel-comment-y-repondre-282408