Editors’ Introduction: Private Television in Europe — A New Beginning or the Beginning of the End?

Abstract

In 1984, pay-television channel Canal+ was launched in France; in 1986, free-to-air channels M6 and La Cinq started broadcasting. On 16 January 1985, President of the French Republic Francois Mittérand announced his willingness to privatise TF1, the biggest public service television station in France (Dyson, 1990: 133). Several elements accounted for the liberalisation of the French television market and the president’s pronouncement on private television. Indeed, whereas there was no intent to abandon the system of public broadcasting altogether and to relinquish the substantive advertising revenues that financed it, the French were in general favouring private television. Public television was considered overly dull (Donders, 2012: 12; Van Den Bulck, 2007: 65-74), whereas private television — perhaps now suffering from a conservative image — represented something fresh and new for French audiences and those elsewhere in Western Europe. Also, personal relations between French elite political classes and those seeking profit in private television pushed for an opening of French television to market forces. Having said that, there were also many fears about the possible excesses of the, sometimes alleged, inferior, trashy and merely entertaining programming of private television.KeywordsCommercial TelevisionPublic Service BroadcastingFrench RepublicTelevision MarketBroadcasting OrganisationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.