- MP Céline Calvez, commissioned during confinement by Marlène Schiappa to make recommendations on the place of women in the media, released her report on Tuesday.
- Two surveys by the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) and the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) confirm for one the very low presence of women on television, and for the other a drop in the presence expert women during the health crisis.
- The member wants the audiovisual sector to count women better and more often, and recommends that the written press condition its aid to respecting equality between women and men.
"Experts must also be experts," warned Marlène Schiappa on April 5 in her mission letter to MP Céline Calvez on the place of women in the media in times of crisis. A mission entrusted following the outcry provoked by the front page of the newspaper Le Parisien . Two and a half months later, while two investigations, one from the Superior Audiovisual Council (CSA) and the other from the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) confirm the fears of the Secretary of State, the MP released a first progress report, submitted to the Minister of Culture and the Secretary of State for equality between women and men. In particular, he recommends better counting women in the media, more finely and more often, and wants to condition aid to the press on equality criteria.
This work, which covers the months of March and April 2020 and the beginning of May, is the result of the analysis of these two surveys and the hearing of nearly 150 people. The text first recognizes the difficulties that the media went through during the confinement, and underlines the “role of bridging the inequalities between women and men” of the health crisis.
"We have a real dropout"
Women experts, or those with a higher “authority”, according to the different categorizations of the CSA and the INA, were very much in the minority during this period: they respectively formed 20% of the people seen during the reports, emissions, JT , and other information debates, against 38% in 2019, as demonstrated by the CSA.
But the deputy wants to be more proactive than the CSA, which in its report largely imputes this lack of presence to the real composition of society: "We have a real dropout that we cannot just attribute to the distribution of power in the economic and political spheres. We shouldn't just say that it is because society is like that that the media are, ”she explains to 20 Minutes . The member wants to demonstrate the rise observed in the figures of radio morning or France Television, which gave 9% of experts in March, before rising to 20% in April.
"Tightening the cracks"
To remedy this lack of presence, the text of the deputy first recommends to quantify more precisely this presence, both at the level of organizations (positions of responsibility, working conditions, etc.) and content: "So that women count, you have to count them first. Céline Calvez thus proposes to "continue to enrich the indicators of the annual report of the CSA", especially in times of crisis, and to encourage the audiovisual media to count every month, or at least every three months. "Counting every year is a good thing, but when we are in a crisis we need to have alerts, that's why we may need to tighten the cracks", tells us -she.
While the audiovisual sector is obliged to count women on its channels, the member wishes, and this would be a novelty, "to propose solutions to the written press" and to play the role, initially of an incentive towards this sector.
Some media already count: the newspaper Ouest France has a data barometer, while the daily Les Echos regularly screens the digital version. The newspaper Le Monde collects data every three months on the gender of the signatories, the people interviewed and on the front page of the newspaper, according to the report.
A theme that "irritates"
To encourage the written press, all or part of the aid paid to it by the State could be subject to compliance with a certain number of indicators. Or a bonus be paid to virtuous magazines and newspapers. Newspapers that invest in tools for better counting, such as the Le Temps paritometer , could receive a tax credit. Several media have offered to test this tool. “The idea of this report is also to identify good practices. If some media manage to do it and we manage to show others that it works it will have a training capacity, ”said the MP.
In the meantime, the idea of conditioning press aids even more (they already are) makes some teeth cringe. “I know this topic is irritating, but I'm not here to make things without roughness. We are at a time when we have an overhaul of the press sector, in a post-covid period, with a debate on the conditionality of this aid on environmental objectives. So you have to do it. Aid must be able to accompany the development of the media and of society in general, if it is public money, "says the MP, announcing a fact- finding mission to 20 minutes on this subject in the coming months. in the National Assembly.
What about the Guide of Experts, a free tool for journalists, which records 700 connections per day, and offers some 4,000 experts to almost 5,000 accredited journalists, but has no more money? The MEP is waiting at this stage to find out whether the sustainability of this tool - which has existed since 2015 in digital form - will be able to go through funding the media themselves, or will have to require specific rescue. "Our job is to say" we have to finance "", assures the deputy. The final report is expected by the end of August 2020.
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