And folks talk about the dire straights the U.S. newspaper industry is in. According to a piece in the UK Guardian, “The crisis-hit French press is among the least profitable in Europe, stifled by rigid communist print unions, a lack of kiosks selling papers and a declining readership far below that of the UK or Germany.” French President Nicolas Sarkozy is pledging enhanced subsidies to the papers and one year of free newspapers for every 18-year-old to help them develop newspaper reading habits. Sounds great, except that given Sarkozy’s efforts to tighten state control public TV, his speech announcing the aid and at the same time instructing newspapers to improve their content, and as a the Guardian puts it, “a climate where politicians rewrite their own interviews for publication,” it seems hard to imagine that government subsidized (or more greatly subsidized) papers won’t at least be tainted (perhaps an understatement) by the perception of government control. One can add to the thorniness of that situation the historical context that after the Liberation from Nazi occupation in 1944, “90% of papers were banned mostly on the pretext of collaboration” and “new titles were seen to be blighted by their obsession with politics, and their state-funding.”
The comments on this piece at the Guardian site are worth a read for an interesting range opposing viewpoints, btw.
Tags: France, newspapers
