Saturday, it was World Press Freedom Day. One needs one, as it takes funeral praise. And it was also World Asthma Day. Coincidence speaks (by coughing): press freedom, and the press itself, are asthmatic. Thursday, at the Geneva demonstration on May 1, media workers intervened to say and repeat that supporting the press. Because information “strengthens our ability to think and our power to act” and that it is “an essential bulwark in the face of the reactionary forces offensive”. This is also why when they have power (as now in the United States), they attack them. And so we must defend it.
An “call to elected officials, policies and communities to save the local press”, launched by Mail On November 13, 2024, had collected 4,500 signatures in three months. The appeal proclaims that “the information has never had as much value”, that it is “a common good” but is “more than ever in danger” and that “without an urgent reaction of the actors concerned, the risk is great to see the press disappear”. However “political responses to the height of the issues at the regional level are revealed” in the face of “the unfair competition of the digital giants who plunder” the contents of the newspapers and “the slowness in the file of direct or indirect aid” to the press, while it is “essential” to act for the “maintenance of a plurality of media and in particular of the written press”. Finally, the call evokes for this “a series of concrete measures within the reach of the public authorities”, some “quickly applicable”, others “to be registered in a longer term”.
So it was a call. A call is waiting for an answer. When you don’t wait for anything, you don’t call anyone. Or God, which amounts to the same. What answer, then to give it to this call? As we try to act where we are rampant, we made a project of motion to the municipal council of Geneva, which we deposited yesterday, with the signatures of socialists and elected general on the left. The motion takes up the appeal the measures that are fastest adopted by the City of Geneva. It focuses on support for the printed press (we will be forgiven this pleonasm), because it is this media sector which is currently the most threatened. And that it is also the media sector that receives the least more or less spontaneous, or more or less interested support. And even, that among the supports he receives, some prove to be ineffective (such as taking subscriptions to the paper of newspapers for young people reaching 18 years: a flop), and others, so cautious, and even contradictory as they are, are still challenged by the light horses and the Lourdo-lerrdaes of the whole digital …
-In March, the federal chambers had increased an increase in indirect assistance from the Confederation to the regional press. Modest help, insufficient (it would go from 35 to 85 million francs) and burdened with a heavy mortgage in its very intentions: it does not aim to support the print, printed, but to facilitate its transition to a digital format. But so modest, insufficient, mortgaged it is, this aid is still too much for the right of the right: a referendum was launched against it by a committee stuffed with young UDC and PLR, which is proclaimed “Team Liberté” and whose watchword is to refuse to grant “even more money for the retrograde media”. What is a retrograde media? It is a printed newspaper in which we do not necessarily read what we already think we know. A newspaper in which expressed opinions other than those which are cultivated (or which we have inherited). In short, a retrograde media. A space of freedom and debate, printed, on paper? Something from the 18th century, what.
To present the project of the Canton of Geneva to offer young people subscriptions to newspapers, the Chancellery of State of the Parvulissima Republic (where the majority of daily newspapers which seemed when we started to read the newspapers has disappeared) proclaimed that “the press represents a pillar of public debate and the foundation of a formal and strong democracy”. That’s said. A little less well understood. Let us say that certain actors of this “formal and strong democracy” tend to understand the word “foundation” only in its bodily sense.
All the more reason to ask, where we can still do it, and who seems a priori willing to hear it (a municipality on the left, for example), to understand “foundation” as it becomes urgent to understand, when it comes to the press.
