“There is a particularity in the broadcast of this speech, it will be slightly delayed”, announced journalist Nathalie Maleux on Monday evening. Aurélie Didier, deputy editorial director of information at RTBF, then detailed the reasons for this choice. “We have noted on several occasions that Donald Trump has made racist, far-right, xenophobic and incitement to hatred remarks. We decided to broadcast his speech with a slight delay to take the time to analyze it. This is a practice that we have already applied for many years at RTBF, in French-speaking Belgium, and which we call the media cordon santé. It allows us to avoid trivializing such comments, to normalize them.”
In the eyes of Aurélie Didier, “It’s not about censorship.” The deputy editorial director of information made it clear that “RTBF does not do censorship.
Georges-Louis Bouchez does not seem to agree. “The RTBF information department is not the Ministry of Censorship and Propaganda,” he warned. As president of a party in the hands of a government which oversees the RTBF, he announces: “We will act accordingly.”
