In Belgium, Donald Trump’s inauguration speech was broadcast with a slight delay of two minutes on the RTBF channel, which claims to have made use of the country’s “media sanitary cordon”. The Society of Media Journalists said it was hostile to this decision.
More than 680,000: this is the number of French viewers gathered this January 20 on CNews, at the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration and speech. Yet while the world’s 24-hour news channels were focused on the United States that day, things were slightly different in Belgium.
Indeed, in front of RTBF (the Belgian radio and television of the French Community), then in a special edition, the Belgians attended the speech of the new American head of state, with a slight delay of two minutes, voluntary on the part of the media .
A delay to “avoid trivializing” Donald Trump’s remarks
“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,” explained Aurélie Didier, deputy editorial director of information at the channel.
In Belgium, the “sanitary cordon” – a practice which aims to exclude far-right political parties from any political majority – was introduced in two distinct stages, in 1989 and then in 1992. Thus, in the country, the media French-speaking audiovisual companies do not grant live airtime to parties “proposing discriminatory or undemocratic proposals”.
-Aurélie Didier had also specified that this cord “allows us to avoid trivializing such comments, to normalize them”. “It is not a question of censorship, RTBF does not do censorship.”
A decision that questions
However, on January 23, the Society of Journalists (SDJ) of the public channel considered the application of the media cordon santé to be “inexact, ignorant and insulting”.
“Our supervisory minister [Jacqueline Galant] announced to the Parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation its intention to “question” the RTBF on this decision,” affirmed the SDJ. “Its party president described RTBF as “the Ministry of Censorship and Propaganda” and promised to act accordingly.”
Jacqueline Galant said she was “surprised” by the channel’s decision, questioned in a plenary session of Parliament by MPs Sabine Roberty and Diana Nikolic. The minister added: “Without in any way calling into question the principle of the cordon santé, I wonder about the effectiveness of this decision to the extent that this retransmission was accessible on a whole range of other French-speaking media.”
