The growing media presence of billionaires in France

Nowadays, media governance around the world is largely in the hands of powerful billionaires with substantial shares in multinational corporations or conglomerates. The phenomenon is a global one. In the United States, the media industry has been marked by the acquisition of the Washington Post by Jeff Bezos and the Wall Street Journal by Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch.

In Turkey, it was notably in the 1980s and 1990s that certain tycoons such as Aydın Doğan immersed himself in the world of media. His group Doğan Holding, one of the biggest conglomerates in Turkey, bought Hürriyet, Milliyet and Radikal. Other media were then acquired by businesspeople such as the Albayraktar family.

More recently, during the 2010s, most of the important media such as Hürriyet, Milliyet or Posta and TV channels such as CNN Turk and Kanal D were bought by the Demirören Holding group under the governance of Yildirim Demirören. In 2018, one-third of newspaper sales were those under the control of the Demirören family.

CLICK - Media Ownership Monitor Turkey

This process of appropriation of the major media has received little enthusiasm and met a lukewarm reception by the population in Turkey. Indeed, media acquisitions can sow doubt in society to the extent that the rhetoric chosen by the media must be aligned with the interests of its owner, which is one of the reasons why newspaper sales in Turkey have plummeted.

There is currently only one newspaper with sales exceeding 200,000 newspapers per week. In January 2001, the sales of Hürriyet, a newspaper often classified in the political spectrum as a liberal-conservative newspaper, was selling 640,000 copies per week, its sales have fallen by about 70 percent over a 20-year period, approximately amounting to 200,000 copies per week.

Media conglomerates in France

In France, the phenomenon is also widespread since 90 percent of media outlets are controlled by billionaires. Bernard Arnault, France's leading wealthy man and founder of LVMH, owns significant shares in Les Echos and Le Parisien. François Pinault, founder of Kering and Artémis, owns the weekly magazine Le Point. The Dassault family, having made a fortune in aeronautics, remains the owner of the right-wing newspaper Le Figaro.

Recently, three active businesspeople emerged in the media sphere — Xavier Niel, the founder of the telecommunications company Free, holds significant shares in the Le Monde group, which includes Courrier International and Télérama. Patrick Drahi, France's third wealthiest individual, also established a media empire by acquiring BFMTV, RMC and the weekly newspaper l'Express, while Pierre Bouygues and Vincent Bolloré started to become involved in television distribution such as the TF1 group and the Canal+ group.

The incentives for businesspeople to integrate the media sphere are multiple. First of all, the cost of its acquisitions is negligible for large conglomerates, LVMH under the direction of Bernard Arnault bought the leading financial magazine Les Echos in 2007 for 240 million euros, representing around 1.5 percent of LVMH sales at the time.

Moreover, some businesspeople, despite their affluence, are sometimes completely unfamiliar to the general public, therefore, these purchases provide increased national or even international visibility for them and their companies, as well as helping them diversify their activities.

Through the purchase of Les Echos, the public is more exposed to the LVMH brand, its recent acquisition of the Tiffany brand or its spectacular rise to become the leading European capitalization. This also applies to a certain Serge Dassault, an industrialist with a strong presence in the aeronautics sector, who, through his participation in Le Figaro, was able to promote his gusts.

In the case of Patrick Drahi, owner of L'Express, BFM TV and RMC, Julia Cagé, professor at SciencesPo, states that the first offers emerged, for a telephone subscription, the consumer could receive a free newspaper. It would therefore be necessary to question this practice, which amounts to devaluing the role of the press and the dedication of the journalists working at L'Express, for example.

Why do they invest in the media sector?

Moreover, despite the fact that the media is not a very lucrative sector like the petroleum or automotive sector, media owners can justify their acquisitions by returns on investment from two sources: firstly, from direct payments, i.e. payment from a consumer who consumes a service such as a subscription to a newspaper or paying to receive cables.Then there are indirect payments, which are revenues paid by agents other than consumers, such as companies that want to use certain platforms to place advertisements or sponsorships.

Furthermore, it is evident that buying a media organization allows these individuals to secure positions of influence where they can wield a considerable impact on political discourse since they are informing the public. Some newspapers and magazines do not confine themselves to informing the people, they are the representative of political movements with a doctrine, an ideology and a well-established editorial line on the political landscape.

This is notably the case of newspapers such as Le Figaro, which stands on the right of the political spectrum, Libération on the left, and Le Monde, which claims to be non-partisan but tends to be labeled as a center-left newspaper. The media's force can also be attributed to its close relationship with politics.

As the media decides how information is presented to the public and therefore act as mediators, politicians keep a close eye on the media. In a country with a free press, the relationship between the media and politicians should be one of opposition, with the former investigating and validating the latter's statements so that the electorate is well equipped when voting.

Regrettably, this function has been greatly undermined, as the press increasingly tries to align itself with the ideologies and agendas of its owner and political allies such as the state who, in return, can facilitate the operations of certain companies and provide public aid.

Macron's election and the media

The journey and ascension of France's President Emmanuel Macron in the France's political sphere is a testament to the influence of the media in shaping public opinion on major occasions such as presidential elections.

Emmanuel Macron, who has emerged as a centrist candidate who vacillates between left and right on issues ranging from the economy and taxation to the European Union and immigration, appeared to embody modernity and renewal of spirit in a space dominated by traditional parties and parties of extremes that seem to have no concrete answers to the current challenges.

However, the president was also able to capitalize on a phenomenon, his media exposure. Having started his career in finance and eventually becoming Minister of the Economy, Macron had previously become acquainted with such prominent figures as Xavier Niel, Matthieu Pigasse and Pierre Bergé, three media personalities who bought the Le Monde group.

According to the opinion media LVSL, the dailies Libération, L'Obs, Le Monde and l'Express, which are media outlets with significant presence, have more than 8,000 articles mentioning Emmanuel Macron from January 2015 to January 2017; in comparison, the total number of articles mentioning Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Arnaud Montebourg and Benoît Hamon in the same dailies and over the same period of time amounts to only 7,400.

This one instance is one of the thousands that highlight the loss of media plurality in France, a phenomenon that has tarnished France's image and its record in some of the official lists it holds in high regard. In a Reporters Without Borders ranking of countries on press freedom that takes into account a multitude of factors such as the working conditions of journalists, i.e. whether they are safe, the independence of the media, the plurality of the media and the effectiveness of the legal framework, including its ability to protect journalists from abusive legal proceedings, also known as "gagging", France was ranked 34th, i.e. it remains a country where press freedom is generally respected unlike in Turkey (153rd), nevertheless, the situation can shift and become alarming.

"The capitalist interference"

The country was not able to move up in the rankings because of certain shortcomings, Christophe Deloire, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, citing, in particular, a capitalist interference that can generate conflicts of interest, thus disturbing the sovereign freedom of expression of the media and distinguishing the country from its neighbors like Switzerland (10th), Belgium (11th) and Germany (13th).

This decent but unsatisfactory place can also be understood by the contempt of some politicians for journalists, but more pronounced for some businesspeople: the billionaire Vincent Bolloré, who has been conducting reprehensible activities in countries like Togo and Benin, has been widely denounced by journalists.

Bolloré has therefore found the solution in systematic lawsuits aimed at undermining journalists and dismissals. Bolloré has also shown himself to be a very interventionist owner in the media, with documentaries that have not been broadcast due to conflict of interest. These actions represent a threat to the health of democracy in France as it does not hesitate to hide the face of certain facts and infantilize the people.

Despite the presence of laws designed to limit concentration, these laws remain extremely outdated in France and have not been effectively regulating the media since the advent of the Internet, a phenomenon that has revolutionized the way information circulates in our societies. This phenomenon of media appropriation must be a much more central issue in our societies, and in particular, it must be more questioned by young people, who in recent years have shown a total lack of interest in traditional media in preference to social networks.

All the people should therefore mobilize to preserve this important aspect of democracy. It is therefore essential to regulate the power of individuals like Rupert Murdoch, whose sole purpose is to pervert politics, misinform the public through the appropriation of the largest media groups and demean democracy by trying to influence elections in the US, England or Australia for commercial purposes and to influence political decision making.

(EKÖ/VK)