De A like Aiseau-Presles to Y like Yvoir, from Dominique Grenier to Patrick Evrard, RTL put them all on the grill, from September 17 to 19, all that Wallonia and Brussels have mayors, with the operation “48 h of the mayors”. For two full days, Caroline Fontenoy, Martin Buxant and Christophe Deborsu took turns to question the 262 + 19 local elected officials. A live “marathon”, according to the established formula, from the town Balat, on the banks of the Meuse, during which RTL intended to celebrate these “artisans of democracy” from all the Walloon and Brussels municipalities, who had all responded. The experiment had already been carried out during the previous municipal elections, in September 2018.
Conclusive, therefore… but not to everyone’s taste, in particular the Superior Audiovisual Council, which announced the opening this Monday of an investigation file on the “48 hours of mayors” operation, after having received several complaints. “The complainants regret that this operation only highlights the mayors in each municipality while the other political trends present at the local level did not benefit from the same media coverage,” explains the Superior Audiovisual Council.
The regulations relating to radio and television programs during the electoral period provide that “publishers ensure balance and representativeness of the different ideological, philosophical and political trends in all the programs they broadcast”. To do this, the editor must take into account the level of the election – in this case, the municipal level – and the impact of the programs concerned.
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The same regulation also stipulates that failing to broadcast programs which present all trends “in a balanced manner”, a publisher must “ensure balance and representativeness in the overall programming of its service, over the entire period electoral”.
With its marathon of September 17, carried out jointly on television, radio and on Facebook, RTL thus attracted complaints, addressed to the CSA, in an air of “bis repetita”: we will remember that already in 2018, the The regulatory and control body had already opened a file of the same type, which resulted, in July 2019, in a warning sanction “for non-compliance with the requirement of balance and representativeness of different ideological trends, philosophical and political, (…) and for not having communicated his electoral system to the CSA”. A simple yellow card, therefore, motivated by the fact that it was, in the eyes of the CSA, the first time that RTL had been questioned on this basis. Furthermore, only the coverage of the operation by Bel RTL was affected by the procedure and the sanction, radio being the only one, in 2018, to be regulated by the regulatory body. As a reminder, the RTL company was still based in Luxembourg at the time, and as such “escaped” the regulations in force.
What will happen this time, since RTL Belgium is now, since its acquisition by Rossel/DPG Média, fully considered as a publisher of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation? The CSA investigation secretariat may, at the end of its consultations, decide to close the case without further action, or to transmit it to its college, with a view to sanction. Note that, in its communication, RTL announced – preventively? – that, during the two days of its operation “the mayors (or the opposition)” [étaient] invited by RTL info, a clarification which did not appear in its electoral system published on July 13.
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