Reform ruckus
Jospin delays Trautmann's Gallic TV plans
After 18 months of rewrites and countless rounds of industry negotiations, the proposals were postponed Tuesday following a short meeting between Trautmann and Jospin.
Future in doubt
The decision came two weeks before the French National Assembly was due to debate the law and is a serious setback for Trautmann, whose future at the Culture Ministry is now in doubt.
The center of Trautmann's reform revolved around radically altering the financing of France's main pubcasters France 2 and France 3.
Both are financed by a combo of advertising and state funds, raised via license fee payments. This has left the pubcasters caught between trying to fulfill their role as a public service, while also having to keep audience levels as high as possible to maximize ad coin revenue. Critics say this has led to France 2 and France 3 being virtual clones of the private networks.
Ad time trimmed
In an effort to reduce the pubcasters' reliance on ratings, Trautmann had proposed to cut the amount of ad time per hour to 5 minutes from 12 minutes. This would have meant eliminating about 350 hours of advertising per year.
Such reductions would have involved a drop in revenues of about 2.6 billion francs ($460 million) and also would have entailed increased programming costs to fill the vacant ad spaces.
While opinion polls show most of the French are in favor of cutting the pubcasters' dependence on advertising, the ramifications of such a move have largely left the industry hostile.
For a start, Trautmann has said that the Finance Ministry will make good the shortfall in ad coin. Critics argue that there can be no guarantee this would be the case for future governments, particularly if France hit another economic crisis, forcing across-the-board government cuts.
Political PBS
In addition, by making France 2 and France 3 increasingly dependent on the Finance Ministry, future pubcaster presidents would effectively have to be in favor with any given government, raising the fear that France's public television would be open to political pressure.
Jospin's socialist administration has also come under fire for giving what many see as a multimillion-dollar gift to private networks TF1 and M6, who logically would have been the main beneficiaries of the $460 million ad coin that could no longer be spent at France 2 and France 3.
One proposal -- to tax advertising revenue -- was nixed by Jospin, but the idea of the private sector getting such a huge windfall was a political hot potato for the prime minister.
The private networks have been fairly discreet about the television reforms, hoping to benefit from what would have added up to a radical reduction in the space available to advertisers.
