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‘Les médias, c’est moi.’ President Sarkozy and news media management

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This article examines the news media management activities of President Sarkozy through a selective analysis of the agenda building, issue framing and image projection functions carried out by the Elysée. The article argues that in the context of Fifth Republic presidentialism Sarkozy has devoted more attention to media management than any of his predecessors. Yet although within a nationally bounded historical framework on, the media-related activities of the Sarkozy presidency are unprecedented in their scale and scope, from a cross-national perspective the more prosaic conclusion is that the practices and style of executive news management in contemporary France have increasingly converged with those to be found in other major Western democracies.

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Notes

  1. The Elysée website is accessible on http://www.elysee.fr.

  2. Television remains by far the single most important mass medium of political information in France well ahead of the press, radio or the internet as the public's primary source of national and international news. For example, although their hold over audiences is under threat in the digital communications environment, the main evening news programmes of the national free-to-air channels TF1, France 2, France 3 and M6 still attract around 18 million viewers in total.

  3. Since 1989 regulation of the broadcasting sector has been undertaken by the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), which consists of nine members – three appointed by the President, three by the Chairman of the National Assembly and three by the Chairman of the Senate. The Council is the latest in a line of regulatory authorities whose origins go back to the 1982 Mitterrand reform. Although the establishment of a regulatory authority represented an important symbolic break with previous practices of direct political control, it took some time – and the establishment of no fewer than three consecutive regulatory agencies in the 1980s – for the notion of an independent regulatory authority to be accepted across the political class. Moreover, appointments to the CSA have been frequently informed more by party political considerations than professional competence and the authority currently has a very strong bias towards the Right.

  4. If the President is opposed by a coherent majority in the French Parliament, executive power is shared between the President and the Prime Minister in the process known as cohabitation. In these circumstances the President has to compete with the Prime Minister as an official source for the news media. Cohabitation last happened in 1997–2002 when a center-right President (Chirac) shared power with a center-left Prime Minister (Lionel Jospin).

  5. In November 2008 Sarkozy was briefly displaced as number one personality in television news, with the French media focusing their attention on the internecine warfare between Martine Aubry and Ségolène Royal for the leadership of the Parti socialiste.

  6. The new rules specify that political figures from the parliamentary opposition must receive at least half the time given to appearances by the President, government ministers, the parliamentary majority and presidential advisers combined.

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  1. Department of Politics, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Raymond Kuhn

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Kuhn, R. ‘Les médias, c’est moi.’ President Sarkozy and news media management. Fr Polit 8, 355–376 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2010.18

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