Héloïse Goy, with Alexis Patri 10:38 a.m., March 22, 2022

While the future of the contribution to public audiovisual has entered into the debate of the presidential election, private radio stations published a joint press release on Monday in which they recall their attachment to a return to the financing of public audiovisual which is only public, not public and private.

This is a request expressed less than three weeks before the first round of the presidential election, while the future of the contribution to public broadcasting has become part of the debate.

Private radio stations published a joint press release on Monday in which they ask that public broadcasting be financed only by public money.

Private radio stations reiterated their attachment to a return to 100% public financing of public broadcasting and are worried that public service media are developing advertising resources.

According to her, this amounts to penalizing the private media. 

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In concrete terms, private radio stations ask that commercial advertisements be reserved for them, because they are their only source of funding, unlike public radio stations which already benefit from public funding.  

"Maintain the balance and complementarity between public and private media"

This concern arises in a context where public radio stations occupy an increasingly large share of the advertising market.

Even though this advertising market is declining for all radio, the share of the public group on this market has fallen from 6% in 2016 to 9.1% in 2020. It is only since a decree of 2016 that Radio France has access to commercial advertisements. 

In this statement, where private radios are represented by Sirti (the union of independent radios), private radios ensure that "we must maintain the balance and the complementarity between the public and private media, so that the radio always seduces more the French. We must also preserve the pluralism of the audiovisual landscape."