Quick link to this thoughtful piece on the possibility and desirability of an independent media in Sarkozy’s France – thoughtful primarily for recognising that the desirable level of media independence is not always the maximum level.
“I want a situation without censorship, because I do not want to be responsible for whatever they may say” – Napoleon I, letter to M. Fouché, Jun 1, 1805. Source: Baker, D. (ed)., Political Quotations (Gale: Detroit), 70
Even better data from this 2003 CSA / Marianne poll on l’image des journalistes: 23% of French people think the media are independent of “political power”, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, Jean-Pierre Pernaud, and Claire Chazal are cited as particularly independent. Cross-tabs are included!
Via a long chain of googling too tedious to repeat, I find a wonderful poll on public attitudes towards French journalists. My interest was drawn to the question on public perceptions of journalistic independence. Two questions are asked, one on independence from political parties, and one on independence from economic concerns. Here’s the time-series on [...]
Interesting story last week about Alain Duhamel, respected French television journalist who was sacked for revealing who he would vote for in the upcoming presidential election. Here’s the story, as recounted by someone more familiar with the case than I [thanks Ben!]: Duhamel writes editorials for newspaper, he is a journalist and a political interviewer [...]
[Thanks to Michael for the link] : Jean Baptiste Jouy sacked as director of programmes for France 2. Culture shock at moving from Canal+ a factor.
Measures of central bank independence have sometimes used the rate of turnover of Central Bank Governors as an indicator of de facto independence (which, it turns out, is reasonably strongly correlated with de jure independence). How does it work for PSBs? The following table gives the average time in post of a number of PSB [...]