Best Practices nb#1
Status of journalists (professional and/or
non-professional, including bloggers)
Case
in France
Melissa
Chemam
--
Summer
School for Journalists
CMFP,
Florence, June 2012
--
I
have been a journalist for seven years, trained in Paris and I have been
working as a journalist in France for three years before I moved to report from
abroad and finally worked for British media. From this experience, what I can
underline as a good practice in France is that the status of journalists is
pretty well defined and protected in this European country. Journalist is a
respected profession in France, though many struggles especially freelancers
and bloggers. Journalists have a specific status and laws are into place to try
to protect their work and their independence.
This
status of journalists has been defined pretty early in France, in the late
nineteenth century and is pretty much the same nowadays. It comes from the 1881
Law on the Freedom of the Press voted on July the 29th
1881, under the French Third Republic - often called Press Law of 1881. The law defines the
freedoms and responsibilities of the media and publishers in France and
provides a legal framework for publications. It also therefore regulates the
display of advertisements on public roads. It has been amended several times
since its enactment, but remains in force to the present day.
The text established a number of basic principles, which
liberalised the publishing industry, as the law requires only that publishers
present their names to the authorities with two copies of their work. The
authorities were denied the power to suppress newspapers and délits d'opinion - crimes of opinion, or
types of prohibited speech – was then abolished. It also attributes to
journalist a professional card, the ‘press card’, and grants them with a tax
allowance, two measures aimed at protecting them from financial struggle in
order to insure a better editorial independence.
Another important law define the press’ legal framework in
France in the audiovisual field, dating from 1982. It made radios and
televisions opened to private operators, completely revolutioning the French
broadcasting landscape. A large number of other rules finally protect freedom
of expression for every kind of press in France.
Finally a Charter of the Professional Duties of French Journalists was
adopted by the National Syndicate of French Journalists in 1918 and revised and
completed by the Syndicate in 1938. The Loi Guernut-Brachard passed in 1935
also defined the collective labour contract for journalists. The statute was
revised in 1956 under the leadership of Marcel Roëls, and then in 1968, 1974,
and 1987.
However,
we must note that the media landscape in France has changed a lot in
recent years: the press is trying to conquer the web (with many popular
websites such as Rue 89, Mediapart, etc), the arrival of 14 new, young and very
active channels shaking ageing TV landscape with its five major channels, and
new technologies “redefining the status of journalists”, according to the
European Journalism Centre. “Paradoxically, the press is not doing well but
more and more people are trained in journalism schools, while logs are an
increasingly legitimate source (and more reactive) than newspapers on certain
specialities”, it stated on its website.
According to the BBC country profiles, “France enjoys a free
press and has more than 100 daily newspapers; most of them are in private hands
and are not linked to political parties”. But it is, in fact, a difficult time
for journalists who have encountered a true identity crisis in France.
We can add along with the European Journalism Centre that
“the present media landscape in France has its cultural roots in the postwar
period, when the state decided to regulate an industry that lost credit after
the collaborationist Vichy regime. The state is hence still very present in the
written press (via a recently renewed system of subsidies), the TV (with France
Televisions as a major actor and its president almost directly appointed by the
state), the radio (Radio France group has two stations in the top five in terms
of audience), the cinema (with a complex system of subsidies handled by the
National Cinematographic Center, or the CNC), and more recently on the Internet
(with regulations on cultural products, downloading and property rights known
as Hadopi). State-level decisions regarding French media are thus awaited with
impatience and are often very important moments”.
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Sources:
