VLOG - Blog Review: Politics Moving Away From Television.

Equity in Television Coverage - Part 2: Equity/Equality.

Nicolas Dupont-Aignan is the founder of France Arise, a Gaullist eurosceptic movement, and at the moment, he is frustrated. TF1, the private television channel with the most national audience share (19.3% in February 2017 according to Mediametrie), didn't invite him to their big debate due to take place on 20th March. The programme will feature Jean- Luc Melanchon (Front de Gauche (Left Front), far-left), Emmanuel Macron (En Marche! (Forward!), centre), Benoit Hamon (Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party), left-wing), Francois Fillon (Les Republicains (The Republicans), right-wing) and Marine Le Pen (Front National (National Front), far-right). Dupont-Aignan currently represents 2% of the intentions of vote for the first round of the presidential elections on 23rd April, as shown below:

Polls calculated by Linternaute.com

Dupont-Aignan decided to complain by sending a letter to the CSA (Conseil Supérieur de l'Audiovisuel) Superior Council of Audiovisual Content)). Olivier Schrameck is the president, to whom this letter is addressed. It was published on lejdd.fr by Arnaud Focraud, and my translation is shown below:

Mr Olivier SCHRAMECK

President

CSA

[Address]

Registered letter

Dear President,

After analysing the time of intervention of various political personalities between 1st February to 5th March 2017, and despite many reminders to the CSA, the equity in this presidential election is absolutely not respected.

During the last regional elections, France Arise obtained 3.81% of votes, which is nearly as many as the Left Party (Front de Gauche) and the Green Party (Europe Ecologie les Verts), yet, with a time of 9 hours and 48 minutes on television dedicated to my candidacy, clearly this isn't fair.

This equity, which is based in part on the last regional elections, should oblige television channels to dedicate twice as much time to my candidacy onscreen.

With this in mind, I ask you to act as quickly as possible concerning this scandalous imbalance between the different candidates.

I am conscious that the CSA, which you preside, does everything in its power to preserve equity in the media, which is essential for the smooth democratic running of our politics, and I would like to thank you in advance for the reminders already in place.

We are now 41 days from the 1st round of the presidential elections. 53% of the French population, according to the latest polls, have not yet decided who they will vote for. The respect of equity is a necessity for the smooth running of this presidential election runs smoothly. It is a matter of respect of French voters.

Yours sincerely,

Nicolas DUPONT-AIGNAN

Essonne Deputy

President of France Arise

Presidential Election Candidate

According to Focraud and the French-Press Agency (L'Agence France Presse), Dupont-Aigan is right. Francois Fillon is covered a lot more than his opponents. Here is a statistic of how many hours each candidates has been on air so far on radio and television, according to the CSA:

#Presidentielle2017 Un oeil sur le temps de parole des candidats entre le 1er février et le 5 mars, décompté par le CSA #AFP pic.twitter.com/l5vJCvMWKT

— Agence France-Presse (@afpfr) 10 March 2017

The CSA reacted to this. In a press release on 8th March 2017, they stated: "The Council noticed that the speaking time allocated on television and radio to Francois Fillon was abnormally high. We are conscious however of the particular media coverage condition associated to this campaign and this candidate". This statement reveals that although Fillon is everywhere in the media, a lot of this coverage is because of the current investigation he is in for misuse of public funds (Penelope Gate).

Sources:
http://www.csa.fr/Television/Le-suivi-des-programmes/Le-pluralisme-politique-et-les-campagnes-electorales/L-election-presidentielle-2017
http://www.csa.fr/Television/Le-suivi-des-programmes/Le-pluralisme-politique-et-les-campagnes-electorales/Le-pluralisme-en-periode-electorale
http://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/Dupont-Aignan-en-a-marre-d-etre-rejete-853448

Sputnik: The Outside Player Financed by Russia.

As we get closer to the french elections, I need to write about the foreign players who try and influence the national debate. Sputnik is a multimedia website, completely financed by Russia (available in both French (https://fr.sputniknews.com/) and English (https://sputniknews.com/).

Sputnik website available in French at fr.sputniknews.com

The name is a reference to the satellite sent in space by the Soviet Union in 1957, during the race for the conquest of space between USSR and the United States. According to Arte, a French television channel, "373 million euros were unlocked [in 2015] to finance the foreign content of Rossia Segodnia, the agency that controls Sputnik" (translated from French). Today, Sputnik has a Facebook page for France called "Sputnik France" with more than 270 000 likes, and their slogan is: "Nous dévoilons ce dont les autres ne parlent pas" ("We reveal what others don't talk about").  

Yesterday, C Politique, a political programme that airs every Sunday evening on France 5, broadcast a report about Sputnik. The team was the first to be allowed to investigate Sputnik's offices in Paris, as long as they kept their location secret. The report criticises how bias Sputnik is. It includes interviews such as one with Francoise Dauce, specialist in Russian media, who claims that Sputnik "contains elements of reporting that are similar to propaganda". Rudy Reichstad, founder of a blog called the Observatory of Conservationism, claims that "[Sputnik]'s aim is not to inform the population, their aim is to influence the political opinion of the public". After this report, Sputnik fired back at France 5 in two articles entitled "France 5 attacks Sputnik but mixes up its accusations" and "When France 5 doesn't verify its information".

In this article The Independent, Emmanuel Macron, leader of movement "En Marche" and French presidential candidate, is reported to be attacked by media controlled by Russia: "Mr Macron has been the target of false reports spread by state-controlled media, including Russia Today and Sputnik".

I want to emphasise two points. First, television acts as a regulator of information which I believe is necessary to our democracy. Sources from the external media are not regulated like television, and this freedom can become a way of having unbalanced arguments. This is even more true for the younger individuals. Reichstad says "The younger generation, which gets its information mainly on the Internet and don't necessarily distinguish true from false, is permeable to conspiracy". 

Sources:

http://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/russie/video-c-politique-a-enquete-sur-le-media-russe-sputnik-en-france_2093809.html

http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/rue89/rue89-medias/20150202.RUE7710/sputnik-l-arme-de-propagande-russe-arrive-en-france.html

http://info.arte.tv/fr/sputnik-la-propagande-russe-en-orbite
http://www.liberation.fr/france/2016/03/11/rudy-reichstadt-une-vision-du-monde-de-plus-en-plus-paranoiaque_1439154
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-russia-le-pen-en-march-french-elections-cyber-attacks-fake-news-a7578011.html

YouTube, a Useful Tool for Politics?

Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the presidential candidate of the political party "Front de Gauche" ("Unsubmissive France"). This party was founded in February 2016, and has a left-wing populist ideology.  What makes the candidate so interesting is his use of the latest technologies. Currently, he owns a YouTube channel with 228 000 subscribers (https://www.youtube.com/user/PlaceauPeuple). To give you an idea of what this represents, Francois Fillon, head of the right wing party, has 4 608 subscribers. This makes him the most subscribed political runner in France. His channel is increasingly popular (only 40 000 subscribers in October 2016). This is a graph showing the additional views and subscribers he gets per months:

Youtube channel statistic for PlaceauPeuple (Melanchon) on SocialBlade
Total additional views per month
Total additional subs per month

In his videos, Mélanchon encourages viewers to subscribe, and like his content. Here is en extract for his one of his videos five days ago (subtitled in English):

His campaign director, Manuel Bompard, describes the advantage of the medium:

It's a medium where we can share our opinions, with a framework that is not biased to journalistic treatment. [...] For us, it has never been a gadget to be popular, but rather a tool that offers a lot more opportunities to do politics. (Leloup, 2016)

Sources:
https://qz.com/903417/french-presidential-candidate-jean-luc-melenchon-kicked-off-his-campaign-by-hologram/
http://www.lepoint.fr/presidentielle/l-hologramme-bluffant-de-jean-luc-melenchon-05-02-2017-2102605_3121.php
http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2016/12/28/le-candidat-melenchon-creve-l-ecran-sur-youtube_5054714_823448.html

Hugo Décrypte - Politics for a Young Audience on YouTube.

Thumbnail from Hugo Decodes the Presidentials - Education

Hugo Travers is a 19 year old politics student who owns a YouTube channel called Hugo Décrypte (Hugo Decodes). It has more than 100 000 subscribers, and aims to explain politics to a younger audience. His videos offer explanations on the most recent political events - "5 minutes to explain the Fillon Affair", "5 minutes to understand the refugee crisis, "5 minutes to describe the state of emergency" etc. It also includes interviews with politicians, such as Jean-François Copé and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet (Les Républicains), Benoit Hamon and François de Rugy (Socialist Party) etc.

His aim is to make politics accessible to a younger audience, often neglected by traditional media as the subject is considered complex and not very visual. He states: "I think back to my sister, who is interested in the news but finds that the media doesn't take enough time to reexplain the context of a certain situation [...] video is a good way of making the information simple and accessible to interest young people on up-to-date topics". His most recent videos have been made in partnership with Le Monde (lemonde.fr), one of the most prominent French newspapers out there.

Statistics show that video platforms such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo etc. are increasingly popular amongst young audiences. In a study from 3rd March 2017, Mediametrie analyses the audience that watches online videos. In January 2017, 30.4 million people have watched at least one video on a computer screen, which represents 55% of the French population. It found that people between 15 to 34 years old watch an average of 7 hours 27 minutes per month, which is 2 hours and 10 minutes more than the general average.

This strong appeal to young audiences is of interest to television channels. YouTube has become competitor since its a platform that offers audiovisual content which rivals with what's on television. How should TV channels deal with this type of competition? Hugo Travers was given the opportunity to bring his content to TV with LCI, a continuous (and rather unpopular) information channel owned by TF1:

1/2#nouveaute#LCI

Bienvenue @HugoTravers qui nous proposera désormais ses décryptages et ses interviews sur @LCI ts les dimanches matin pic.twitter.com/J4LzJYqtzM

— TF1 Pro (@TF1Pro) 23 February 2017

Translation: Welcome Hugo Travers, who will offer us his decoding and interviews on LCI every Sunday morning.

Is this a way of containing the YouTube threat? Will the audience follow Hugo to LCI? I seriously doubt it...

Sources:

http://jactiv.ouest-france.fr/ils-sactivent/spotted/seulement-19-ans-hugo-decrypte-lactualite-sur-youtube-62090

http://www.lemondedesados.fr/

http://www.lemonde.fr/
http://www.lci.fr/sujet/hugo-decrypte/