When Bercy freezes the bank accounts of the Russian propaganda channel RT, signing its pure and simple disappearance, Mémona Hintermann’s book comes out, “A journalist shouldn’t say that? (Hugo Doc). Advisor to the CSA – the High Council for Audiovisual, the regulatory body for this sector – from 2013 to 2019, she tells under what conditions the Poutinian channel was authorized in France. Only the legal considerations counted, she says, the file was instructed “as if the request came from a small entrepreneur”of a “average candidate”.
“We did not question the political dimension […], The assassination of the journalist-investigator Anna Politkovskaïa, the expedition to the gulag of her rivals, the poisoning of an opponent with polonium? These journalistic stories did not interest the instruction of a file by the regulator. […] We fell into the Russian trap because we looked through the small end of the telescope on the right. »
This decision pointed Emmanuel Macron (elected a few weeks later) against the institution. Mémona Hintermann reports that in November 2017, in Roubaix, the president vilified a CSA “ankylosed, a bureaucratic object completely above ground, to be reformed from top to bottom”. Since then, CSA and Hadopi – which regulated the internet – have merged. The new entity, the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom), presents its wishes for the first time this evening, Monday January 23, and is preparing to welcome two new members.
Mémona Hintermann had not been asked for this position of Sage, as is often the case. She had applied. However, the CSA, it was not his type. On this institution she has a unique look, forged by a career which, in such a cenacle, stands out. His childhood and youth were spent in great poverty, far from the metropolis, in Reunion. She worships education: “I would have become a thug, prison was waiting for me. Over two generations, school has broken social determinism for hundreds of thousands of us. » She arrived in Paris thanks to a competition organized by the Maison de la Radio. Married to a German, having spent years in the field as a senior reporter for France 3, she looks at the small French world with distance.
“A law must profoundly reform audiovisual regulation”
Without betraying “Vatican” secrets, she returns to the dismissal of the CEO of Radio France, Mathieu Gallet, in 2018, which occurred after the latter was sentenced to a one-year suspended prison sentence for acts that occurred in a previous public company. That he appealed against this conviction had not given Gallet the slightest reprieve. Perhaps the CSA would have come to this conclusion on its own, but in this case the government unashamedly exerted pressure on this authority paid to be independent: “The call to impeach him was deeply disturbing. […] dismissing him in such an atmosphere was deeply detestable. »
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Faced with Eric Zemmour, the author believes that the CSA was not up to it: “In the years preceding the candidacy of the standard bearer of Reconquest, had the regulator been up to the danger threatening democracy? » The answer is in the question.
“Our administrative stings made the bosses and the increasingly popular star of the far right laugh. »
In 2019, when LCI broadcast live a speech by Zemmour at the right-wing convention, Mémona Hintermann, who was no longer at the CSA, signed a column in “Le Monde” urging the institution to cut the channel’s signal. .
Even if, at the CSA, she had set out to try to change things, she takes note of the inability of the media to show France in all its diversities. However, this subject is a major one: thus, “the way of seeing social diversity conditions the questions of housing, jobs, consideration”. Above all, it is formal: “A law must profoundly reform the audiovisual regulation, as crucial as that of energy. » The current one dates from… 1986.
