Session 5: THE NEW EUROPE AND THE STRUGGLE OVER MAINTAINING PUBLIC BROADCASTER VALUES

The future of public service broadcasting in "new" and old Europe was at issue in this session produced by France 2.

• Do public and private broadcasters have different news agendas or do they now share the same editorial values?
• What fallout for embattled public service broadcasters such as Britain's BBC and Italy's RAI?

Session Chair: Christine Ockrent, Journaliste, France 3

Confirmed Speakers: Ragnar Auglaend, Editor in Chief, NRK, Norway; Charles Bebert, Managing Director, Kane Media & Telecoms Consulting, France; Jean-Marie Cavada, Député européen MEP, France; Xavier Colin, Chef Rubrique Internationale, TSR, Switzerland; Mario Crespo, Senior Anchor, SIC, Portugal; Marius Dragomir, European Counsel, Professor - Media, University de Louvain, France; Greg Dyke, former Director-General, BBC, UK; Richard Fuchs, Assignment Editor, RTL Hungary; Gunnar Hoidahl, Head of Programs, NRK, Norway; Ioulia Kapoustina, journalist, REN-TV Paris Bureau, Russia; Dmitry Mednikov, Vice Director of News, RTR, Russia; Christa Prets, Député européen MEP, Austria; Dusan Rejlic, Media consultant, Germany; Carlos Rodrigues, Journalist, SIC, Portugal; Jose Rodrigues dos Santos, Head of News, RTP, Portugal; Christophe Scherer, Directeur, Francetélévisions Publicité, France; Maurizio Torrealta, Head of News, RAI 24, Italy;

Produced by Patrick Lecocq, Pierre Allain, and Mariusz Kowalcyzyk, France 2

THE NEWS XCHANGE TEAM APOLOGISE, HOWEVER IT HAS NOT YET BEEN POSSIBLE TO MAKE TRANSCRIPTS OF THOSE PARTS OF THE SESSION MADE IN FRENCH.

Christine Ockrent: Good morning and thank you for making it! It's very brave! My name is Christine Ockrent, I'm an editor-in-chief with France Television and you're going to undergo a very strange experience because this session is going to be conducted in French. But be relieved because there are also some participants who speak English.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

(Unidentified French)

Ragnar Auglaend: Hello Lisbon, the main topic here tonight will be the further developments in a pyramid racket scheme that is a company called the '5% Community' which went into bankruptcy yesterday and 70,000 Norwegians made a loss of €120m. Further, due to the fear of terrorism, 120,000 shelters will be revitalised in Norway, these shelters have been used up till now for other purposes but because of the fear of terrorism they're going to be revitalised. In foreign news, we'll be following the developments to what type of soldiers Norway is sending to Iraq, will they be soldiers at war or soldiers doing relief work? Another foreign story will be the Sudan agreement to United Nations participation in Nairobi where we have a Minister of Development together with the secretary general, Kofi Annan. They're the topics tonight in, according to the World Bank, the world's third richest country, Norway.

Christine Ockrent: Congratulations - not just the third richest, but also with a small but very distinguished population. Thanks very much indeed.

Richard Fuchs: Our headline story is a scandal that broke out today. A team of doctors found out that there are some painkillers that contain some very harmful chemicals. They did some research and found that ten per cent of people with kidney disease are diseased because of these dangerous chemicals. As far as foreign news is concerned, we will most probably mostly be dealing with the aid arriving into Fallujah. We've been dealing with Fallujah for the last ten days so this will probably be one of the last stories. We won't have any sport because we have a different programme for sport. If there's something very interesting going on in sport then we usually put it at the end of the programme but there is nothing for today.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

(Unidentified in French):

Jose Rodrigues Dos Santos: Iraq is of course a major story in our news programmes. The thing about Iraq is that there are also Portuguese troops in Syria, and that is an issue that makes people nervous and also the fact that Portugal supported the war in Iraq. But there was a lack of popular support for the war so we have a situation where there are opposing pressures from people and the interesting thing is we always have to find an angle which is something that can liaise. We try to get general stories that tell what's going on in Iraq.

Carlos Rodrigues: We may differ in some respects but television in Portugal both public and private goes through a very uniform type of approach. Basically we all live in the same universe but public television has been trying for the past few years to divorce itself without depending on the commercial universe. There has been no political will to work on a clear rupture. I must pay tribute to my colleague because for the past few years he's been heading news there and has been doing really well. It's very difficult, he deals with tendencies that I don't at the moment. I'm in a very small part of the market, on an independent news channel.

Maurizio Torrealta: Basically there is a big contamination between private and public television. The agenda may be the same but don't forget we have military in Iraq, so talking about Iraq is an issue for both private and public television. Yet even though it looks like the same agenda, the language is different. The language of public television is more deep and analytical. Private television is more influenced by advertising. It's faster and gets interrupted many times.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Dimitry: I'm glad that this session is in French so that I can speak English! Iraq is not a Russian war, so we only cover events in Iraq when it's the major news of the world. We probably put such stories in our show about twice a week and they are never the top stories. Probably fifth or sixth after a train crash in Russia. And maybe some social stories!

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Dimitry: I really don't know because I'm not in Russia right now. Tomorrow we will start with news of the weather in the Moscow region because the weather causes real problems for people back home.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Ragnar Auglaend: We would like to believe it, we would like people to understand what's going on, we've got a conflict with our allies. Our main ally the US wants people to believe that we're a part of the coalition, but our government says we're not. We have a dilemma and we're trying to explain that. But as a matter of principle we would like to believe that public service broadcasting means serving the public, whereas commercial broadcasting means delivering your viewers to advertisers. That's to put it squarely, that's what I believe but that's not the full picture. I think competition from the commercial broadcasters was a blessing to us, we were arrogant, we were boring, we were too intellectual. So when commercial broadcasting came along, we had to change, we had to show more respect to the public, that's what we're trying to do, to give better stories and explain things better. To have crime, disaster and also background commentary. I think we've improved thanks to the pressure from the commercials and I think they have approached doing the news in our way.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Marius Dragomir: First of all I'd like to say that we're starting this project in January 2005 and we're organising round table discussions in the twenty countries we cover, plus Kosovo, so we really don't have the finished report but we already have some impressions, we've already organised eight round tables. Normally I'm based in Prague, in the Czech Republic but I'm in Bucharest today because we've been having a round table to discuss the Rumanian national report. We found in most of the countries and it's interesting because we decided to cover most of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe, we also studied four western European countries because we wanted to see if we could find a model, and the four countries that we covered in this research are the UK, France Germany and Italy. If we look at the Central and Eastern European countries there is basically no distinction between the public and commercial stations. That's the trend that we noticed and a lot of people agreed with us. Like I said, we had this Romanian round table yesterday and now I'm in the Romanian state television so I hope they won't cut me off for what I'm about to say. Basically people at the round table smacked the Romanian public service broadcaster because it's not able to be different from the commercial stations. It still relies on government television licence and advertising.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Marius Dragomir: Yes, if we look again at Central and Eastern Europe, many countries have struggled through many years of communism, and of course the perception of many people in these countries is that they were the state broadcasters and they still associate them with the old communist state broadcasters and that's why they don't have any trust in it. The other thing we noticed in these countries was that the government don't want to reform these state broadcasters and make them really independent because they can still use them as a tool for manipulating and not only in Romania but in other countries, they don't want reform. These companies employ many thousands of people. Romanian television for example has 3,000, Czech Republic has 1,000. In Slovakia, for example, we found very interesting reform that the director employed last year - Mr Rimnichec. He slashed 1,015 jobs in May this year out of 2,000 people. So the governments don't want to get out of this business because they still see it as a political tool in their hands.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Marius Dragomir: It's interesting but we need to look at each country to give you an answer. In general most people in these countries take most of their information from television, the percentage is really high, 70-80%. On the other hand, in other countries you find that they don't trust the information from either the state or the public broadcasters. The reason I said earlier that we covered the four western European countries was so that we could find a model for the countries with emerging democracies, but it was a really big disappointment. First of all let's talk about Italy in this report. For Central and Eastern European countries this is the way not to do things. You know, with the media dictatorship of Mr Berlusconi owning three private channels plus controlling the state media. I really think that people are losing their trust in state television and the phenomenon that we are noticing in many countries is that people do not trust the political and social information they are getting from television and so they are relying on it for entertainment.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Jose Rodrigues Dos Santos: On Monday me and my team in the newsroom resigned our positions so we are acting now but very soon I will be out of a job.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Jose Rodrigues Dos Santos: I felt there was interference in my job. I will not discuss the details publicly until I speak in parliament on Monday and to the Broadcasting Commission on Monday. I have made a full statement to the council of RTP, the newsroom council, which is made up of a few journalists selected by the council. But I won't make public comments on the issue.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Greg Dyke: No I think the BBC's in pretty good shape. When the staff took to the streets that day, it scared the politicians to death, the Hutton report had come out and the politicians thought it cleared the government, the public rejected the Hutton report and all the polls showed that. Public support for the BBC never wavered, according to the polls, whereas the polls said that public support for Tony Blair nearly collapsed. I think what I said to the politicians was, if you're going to have a big bust up with the BBC, you're probably going to lose and I think they probably did lose. Later of course we got the Butler report, which was the report that examined the reasons we went to war, and of course the Butler report said that all Dr Kelly's allegations were true. I think that has left a bunch of chastened politicians who will think long and hard before they go to war with the BBC again, so the only question is has the BBC lost its nerve? And we won't know that until another big story comes along that the government doesn't want broadcast.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Greg Dyke: Nothing has been announced yet so it's very difficult for me to comment. All organisations from time to time need to look at their expenditure and ask, can we do this cheaper, can we save money? Given that the BBC's income is fairly secure, can we spend more money on programming? I did it when I first arrived at the BBC. The BBC's not really short of money but that's not to say that it shouldn't be as efficient as possible. So that's what I think my successor, Mark Thompson, is looking at. I don't think you should see it as a process that undermines the editorial independence of the BBC, I don't think that's his aim at all.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Greg Dyke: No I don't think they are doing that, what they are doing is looking at the expenditure of the BBC and I think every now and again you have to look at organisations and ask can we do this more efficiently. I don't think that's got anything to do with the editorial independence of the BBC. What I would say is that the BBC isn't short of money, it has a generous licence fee agreement and when I was there we took out a lot of costs, and we diverted costs away from spending on infrastructure to spending on programming. That's what I think they're going to try and do again and if they can do it successfully there's nothing wrong with that.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Greg Dyke: I think there's no doubt that when Sky introduced 24 hour news, that it was obviously the first and the BBC took the view five or six years later that 24 hour news was going to be important in the future and that it too should have a 24 hour news channel, and in fact it's got two. One is in Britain, one is international. I think that was the right decision but the vast majority of people still get their news from the main channel, BBC1. The BBC spends a lot of money on news and what we've seen in recent years is that the independent sector has actually reduced the amount that it spends on news. As we get more and more channels and fragmentation of the marketplace, income obviously declines and what we need to ensure in the future is that BBC news and current affairs is very well funded. We also need to make sure that it's politically independent. I'm pretty optimistic about both.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Unidentified: I have a question for Greg Dyke, as the very senior man that he is, after leaving such a high profile job, did he have any personal troubles finding a new job? I'm curious to ask because in a previous incarnation four years ago, I went through the same trouble that Jose is going through now. It took me first of all the best part of six months to muster the courage to look for a job to beg for a job, three months of assorted crawling until I finally got another job, an adequate job. I notice the London CBC, is that good enough?

Greg Dyke: Well, I'm not working there, what I actually did after leaving the BBC was, a couple of days later I decided to write a book, and Harper Collins paid me a significant amount of money and for the last six months, I've been writing that book. Since then, I've been out promoting the book and now I'm trying to make up my mind whether I actually want to work again. I'm actually quite lucky because at an earlier stage of my life I made quite a lot of money so I don't have to pay the mortgage. I've got enough money to survive quite happily but I'm now deciding whether I want to go back to work full time or would I rather lead a more eclectic life. The book is very critical of Tony Blair and the British government and a lot of people have said that I'll struggle to find a job after writing that. My answer to that is what sort of society is it when, if you criticise the prime minister, you don't get another job.

Unidentified (Swedish): This problem manifests itself both in English and in Swedish so it's a common problem.

Greg Dyke: I heard people talking about resigning earlier, my advice to them is to go public but don't resign.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Greg Dyke: I was out of there anyway because the governors of the BBC told me that I would either resign, or they would fire me. What I do regret is resigning, I wish they had fired me.

Unidentified: Looking back, maybe the timing could have been different. If you'd resigned another time, maybe the effect could have been different. Have you ever thought about that?

Greg Dyke: Yes I have but I wasn't given any option. I was out of there that day, whether I liked it or not. It was a bunch of what I call completely gutless governors that lost their nerves. If my chairman (who resigned the day before) and I had stayed for two or three more days, there would have been no pressure on us, because all the polls showed that the Hutton report had been rejected by the British public who thought it was a pathetic whitewash, which is what it was. What we were defending was the right to report a whistleblower i.e. Dr Kelly, a senior man in the intelligence community. Five months later we got the Butler report, which showed that what he had told us was true. What I find quite remarkable, particularly about the United States, and quite a lot of the rest of Europe, is the respect that is shown to Tony Blair outside of Britain whereas the respect shown to him here, especially amongst Labour party supporters, is pretty minimal. They see him as having taken us to war on a false premise.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Greg Dyke: I've been involved with New Labour for a long time, they didn't appoint me to the BBC. When I joined the BBC, I left the Labour party. I'd always made it clear over many years, that I was always much more interested in the independence of broadcasters than political parties. For two or three years there was no particular clash between us and the government of the day. While history shows that whenever there is a war and you saw this with the Falklands and the former Yugoslavia, and certainly Iraq, as soon as there's a war and there was massive public opposition in this country, I took the view that our job was to report both sides. Tony Blair and his henchmen didn't want us to. That turned into a pretty unpleasant bust-up during the war and with the Kelly affair after the war. My own politics in that is irrelevant. What I was trying to do was defend the independence of our broadcasters.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Unidentified (ITN): Mr Dyke, you should know that this question is coming from opposition, or the former opposition! A couple of quick points I'd like to ask you. First of all you say that it's too early to say that the BBC has changed in the way it takes on difficult stories, because there hasn't been anything yet on the scale of the 45 minute claim to report, but I wonder whether you take the view that human nature will mean that a less robust attitude is taken given that the reporter who did that story lost his job? Surely that must change the way that the BBC takes to reporting these stories. Secondly, I ask from a self-interest point of view really, whether you think the saga of events at the corporation has any implications for the way the BBC's rivals report stories, Sky and ITN?

Greg Dyke: If I take the second question first, I think if Gilligan had reported that story anywhere else but the BBC, it would have disappeared without trace. It was a good story but it wouldn't have created the furore it did. You've got to understand why Alistair Campbell created the furore. He was trying to divert attention away from the other dossier which he'd produced, that he'd stolen off the internet and sexed up himself. The BBC is different, and I think that story on the BBC created more controversy than it would have on any other broadcaster on any other channel. Going back to your first question, I hope that the reporters at the BBC aren't cowed by this, in the two weeks after Hutton was published, I thought there was a lot of nerves at the BBC but I don't t think that's long term. I think the Butler report, which intrinsically supported what Dr Kelly had said, has done a lot to counter that. I hope! What do we ask of journalists? We ask them to check the facts, to be fair and to be accurate. But also we ask them to be brave and it would be very disappointing if the BBC stopped being brave. I think there are a lot of journalists at the BBC that will continue to be brave.

One of the things that's interesting about the UK is because we've always had this requirement of impartiality, that ITN and Sky have done their utmost to follow that. For the BBC that's pretty easy, for ITN historically it's been pretty easy but for Sky it's a bit harder because the same people that own Sky also own Fox news who make no pretence at impartiality. Rupert Murdoch has been known to describe Sky News as 'BBC Lite'. However I think Sky up until now has done a very good job of striving for impartiality. I think the combination of those three broadcast news systems is one of the strengths of broadcasting in the UK, in the sense that if one of them became blatantly pro-government, the others would give it a very hard time.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Ioulia Kapoustina: First of all I'd like to say that all of these images are from my company, they're not Reuters' pictures, it was my freelancer who was shooting them and then we gave them to NTV and then to Reuters and APTN, so that people could see not on the map but having images of what was going on. It's a matter of great responsibility; none of you can imagine what it was like at Beslan. Covering train crashes and bombings, your reporters do not make lives, hundreds of lives do not depend on their words.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Ioulia Kapoustina: In my company we had very tough discussions during the days of Beslan. What should we do - should we go if anything happened because we understood that the situation was going to be resolved peaceably? We understood that we would need to act, but how? We all decided it wasn't a matter of pressure on us, we were discussing all those things with the representatives of Special Forces etc. Verified information. You should understand what your area of responsibility is here and what is a matter of irresponsibility here.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Xavier Colin: (in French)

Unidentified: Did you have a correspondent there and did they give you different figures to the ones the military gave? Just give us a picture of how the situation was.

Ioulia Kapoustina: After that happened we had a freelancer not far from there so we sent him and he was there at almost the same time that the forces arrived. Later we sent our crews from the neighbouring regions and from Moscow. By the evening we had four correspondents and four producers there. My correspondent told us that he thought there were more people than the 354. We had a strong discussion and decided that the critics would be after an ending to the situation and we gave it very strongly in our main analytical programme. We didn't know why the co-ordinating centre of this operation was giving that number and I think that that was their mistake. Afterwards we made our point that we thought this was a mistake. Many people in the co-ordinating centre were fired after this. At that moment when the operation was in progress, we only gave out official information, because I knew that the people inside the school were watching RTR and the impression that your reporter gives could make that person put their leg on a bomb, killing hundreds of people. But we decided that even though the critics would be out, we had to go with the official information.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Dusan Rejlic: There is always this question about whether state broadcasting is taking money from the commercials, and there is always a competition for the advertising budget. But I think it's the competition of the GDP, which determines how much is spent on advertising and how much is left for commercial television. What we see especially in new democracies in Europe is that commercial television comes in with low budgets, which means little budgets on news and current affairs reporting, and it also means poor social standards for the journalists. This affects the quality of commercial television and affects very much how journalists report and how they are safeguarded from pressures from outside.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Dusan Rejlic: It is extremely difficult to generalise about the situation in Europe because at the moment, some data tells us that there are almost three thousand television stations operating in Europe. It depends very much on the concrete situation in any one country. But we see that they fail to attract a huge slice of the advertising budget. Both public service broadcasting and commercial broadcasting is often trying to dumb down programmes. To reach audiences in ways that are not really high quality programming. This means also that in public service broadcasting, despite its remit to provide quality programming, sometimes it's trying to compete at the lower end of commercial television. It leads to a dissatisfaction of the audience, especially in emerging democracies that expected a new television landscape after the huge changes that have taken place in those countries. Nevertheless there is quite secure audience data telling us that public service broadcasters in Western Europe have maintained or even increased their audience share, whereas commercial broadcasters have been on the losing end. I think this tells us a few things about the situation and it tells us that commercial broadcasting has got to look for new ways if it wants to compete in the vastly expanding broadcasting sector.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Charles Bebert: Yes we have compared eight agendas of eight TV stations in Europe, in Belgium, the UK and France and in Italy and it appears that there is some interference perhaps we may say so in the logic of the audience ratings and the pure journalist approach of an agenda because the agenda is different from one television company to another on the same days. Here are the slides, I promised Jim Gold not to show any slides! Just one! As you know and I don't like this word but there are five recipes to avoiding audience figures dropping. It's avoiding political news, it's avoiding international news, it's avoiding sports, culture and stock exchange. And we see that a lot of channels seem to follow that route, you see that the reduction in political news stories is 25% for four channels out of eight, we see that international news is under 35% for five channels out of eight and in terms of sport culture and stock exchange most of the time it's under one story per day which means it's under 5% and stock exchange is out of the bulletin. Another trend as you said was to put some subjects out of the bulletin, the five subjects are splitting the audience, you know that it was common sense before that when the sports bulletin came on and it's just like that for any subject but sports and stock exchange are split into two and put outside the bulletin. Another one is the weather which is the opposite but it comes to the same results, the weather is very good for audience ratings and it earns a lot of money, the trend is to insert it into two breaks which creates three sources of revenue and in countries where it is not possible to have advertising it is fine.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Christophe Scherer: (in French)

Nick Radlo TVB Europe: I'd like to ask Monsieur Scherer, I understand how you can use those sponsored bumpers to introduce sports statistics during football games. Is he prepared to introduce sponsored bumpers into news bulletins to introduce graphics, you could do that, why not do that?

Christophe Scherer: (in French)

Magda Walter: It's not a question, I'd like to go back to Beslan because we only touched on it briefly, I'm an international media consultant and it seems to me that it was too important a story to limit ourselves to the small amount that we did. I think that the argument that the Russian TV channels were reporting the official number of victims because of concerns for the safety of survivors has been denied by reporters of survivors who said that that's exactly what infuriated the hostage takers, that's one point. The other point is that they were actually, not on your channel, I watched Russian TV during the crisis and Russian anchor people were censoring each other live on air, saying, 'we're really not supposed to be saying this, reporting this information', I just wanted to challenge what we'd heard.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Unidentified French man: (in French)

Maurizio Torrealta: In four months RAI will sell stocks to the public, the law only allows the public to hold 1% of the stocks, that's the law and there are a thousand, so the situation is critical in Italy. The family of the Prime Minister are the biggest private three and the Prime Minister controls the board of RAI, the only one representing the opposition, Lucia Annunziata, resigned. So it is a very peculiar situation, nothing is privatised completely before this operation so nobody knows exactly how it will unfold.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Maurizio Torrealta: No, no, no apparently a stock holder will only hold 1%, that will mean that RAI stays public and will stay in public service broadcasting, will keep having a limit on advertising and I don't know whether it will work or not because again there are a thousand ways to bypass the law.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Jean Marie Cavada: (in French)

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Svenning Dalgaard, TV2 Denmark: What's going on is that you have the European Commission has made a decision saying that TV2 Demark has had too little public service material compared to the amount of money we receive in licence fees and therefore we must pay a huge amount of money back to the Danish state, so much money that we would go broke if we continued that way. So the Danish government is using that as an excuse to privatise the company, now that might happen anyway but the interesting thing in this case is that you have in the European Commission, I'm the Brussels correspondent so I follow that, you have a liberal list. You have the commissioner Balkenstein who is a liberal and I think Jean-Marie Cavada could comment on that, as he is a liberal himself.

Christine Ockrent: He is a journalist.

Svening Dalgard: Yes but he's a politician and he's in the liberal group. But you have the case where the Commission is in direct contravention of the Amsterdam Treaty, which says that each government has the right to discriminate in favour of public service TV; and a Commission in Brussels that says you can't do that 'because we have the right to determine how much public service broadcasting there should be and what should be the costs'. And so what has happened to us is that the government which is a conservative liberal government has said, 'very well than we are going to use that as an excuse to privatise the company'. We have appealed the case to the European Court but anyway it is being used to carry through privatisation which will probably happen within the next three or four months.

Christine Ockrent: My question to you is this, as a socialist are you concerned that the liberal trend within the EU will be such that public sector broadcasting may undergo either privatisation or will no longer be sheltered from the current regulations which do limit not only privatisations but also the impact of ownership and so on and so forth.

Christa Prets: As a socialist I think we have to take care of public broadcasting, we have to ensure that public broadcasting is independent and without government influence. Economic power, media power and political power have to be separated and I think there is a way now as we see in Italy which is going in a totally different way, so we have to take care of that and we have to work for this. We need some instruments to guarantee the independence of the public media services.

Christine Ockrent: What about ownership because apparently what is being discussed in Brussels is that the ownership rules might change and that it might be no longer the rules of where the media operate which would be dominant, it would be the rules of the country that the potential owner operates from and that of course opens a huge space for all sorts of changes, what is your view on that?

Christa Prets: It is the media's decision and the media is in the hands of the member states. There is a problem that the council always mentions, we can't change anything because we don't have the possibility to do it, we don't have a legal basis for changing these systems. So I think we have to find some ways inside the competition markets, inside the law, inside the constitution in the new one. Because as you know in the Charter of fundamental Human Rights, which is a binding part of the constitution, it insists expressly on liberality and plurality of the media. We need both, we need the public sector and the private sector but we need rules that together we have minimum standards for both and that we have the opportunity for the public service to bring the products from the regions and the national products from the market without competition rules.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Jean-Marie Cavada: (in French)

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

Nick Radlo: I'm astonished to hear the story about TV2 in Denmark that the EC told this public service broadcaster that it had to hand back its licence fee.

Christine Ockrent: That's not quite how I understood it, it's not that the EC told them to, it's that the Danish government is using that excuse...

Svenning Dalgaard: We were told to hand back a sum of money from our licence fee, which is a total value of about 50% of the value of the company and I think that most companies would go broke if they had to hand over 50% of their total value.

Nick Radlo: Can I ask what, an organisation that represents public service broadcasters in a sense, the EBU, what position are they taking on this scandal I would call it.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)

David Lewis EBU: You may be assured that has been raised in our presidency and will be raised again at our next meeting on December 1^st. Our legal and public affairs committee is also looking at it very carefully. We are in contact with our Danish members on it, I can't say anymore.

Christine Ockrent: (in French)