The sustainability of funding for public broadcasting, an urgent issue for the new government, will be on the Senate’s agenda on October 23, according to the parliamentary agenda of the upper house revealed at the end of a conference of presidents .
The government has requested the inclusion on the agenda of a proposal for an organic law initiated by the senator, that of Les Républicains senator Cédric Vial and several colleagues from the right and the center. The text must then be adopted quickly in the National Assembly to be promulgated before the end of the year.
Indeed, since the disappearance of the license fee in 2022, public broadcasting has only been financed by a provisional system whose deadline was set at the end of 2024. The text proposes to modify the organic law relating to finance laws, so as to allow public broadcasting to be financed by a fraction of VAT revenue, the option currently in force on a provisional basis. Specific funding for the Arte channel via a “levy on receipts” is also made possible by this text.
Without a vote on sustainable funding by the end of 2024, “next year, the public audiovisual service will be budgeted like any commodity” and “this is not a good system to guarantee independence”, he said. The president of France Télévisions, Delphine Ernotte Cunci, was worried after the dissolution of the National Assembly in June.
Before the dissolution, deputies Quentin Bataillon (Renaissance) and Jean-Jacques Gaultier (LR) had also prepared a text to this effect, opting for their part for financing via a “levy on revenue” from the state budget.
The debates on this emergency text will inevitably put the question of reforming the governance of public broadcasting back on the table. The project of a merger of France Télévisions, Radio France, France Médias Monde (RFI, France 24) and the National Audiovisual Institute (Ina), on track in the spring before the dissolution, is now put on hold.
The Minister of Culture Rachida Dati plans consultations to consider the future. This proposed law on the financing of public broadcasting will be one of the first texts submitted to Parliament by the Barnier government, alongside the bill for the simplification of economic life, a rare survivor from the previous legislature which will be submitted to the Senate vote on October 22. Another text on the agenda: the postponement of the provincial elections in New Caledonia, examined on October 23 in the upper house.
