” Certification of information ” (!?!)
The new name of the Ministry of Truth !
Source : https://www-epochtimes-fr./rachida-dati-favorable-a-la-certification-de-linformation-nouveau-nom-du-ministere-de-la-verite-2575984.html
By Ludovic GENIN for The Epoch Times - March 25, 2024
Rachida Dati in favor of certification of information, new name of the Ministry of Truth
During questions to the government on March 20 , the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati said she was in favor of the certification of information : “On the reliability of information, the avenue on which I am working is the certification of information. » The minister is referring to the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), a certification offered by Reporters Without Borders which should conclude the General Conference on Information this summer.
Information regulation has been a long-standing project since the Bronner commission in 2021 and a government platform in 2020 to relay media deemed “safe and verified”. New variation of the Ministry of Information abandoned in 1974, then described as "Ministry of Truth" or even "Ministry of Censorship", the certification of information risks resting this time in the hands of external certifiers, backed by the algorithmic power of GAFAM — with the blessing of the government.
The JTI certification of Reporters Without Borders, the new name of the Ministry of Information Information
certification is one of the proposals retained by the States General of Information (EGI), proposed by Reporters Without Borders, including Secretary General Christophe Deloire is also president. Recently, the impartiality of the bearer of this certification was called into question after his referral to the Council of State against CNews and its bias with the famous “Where Bolloré passes, journalism dies”, launched on France Inter in July 2023.
Since 2018, RSF has imagined a media labeling system through the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), an information certification tool following 130 criteria verified by RSF “certifiers”. The ambition, according to Thibaut Bruttin, deputy to the general director of RSF, is above all "to show off to advertisers who fear being associated with disinformation, but also to succeed in making this label a algorithmic indexing factor for large platforms,” he declared to La Croix.
This rating given by the JTI would condition the visibility of a media outlet vis-à-vis citizens, in search engines and on social media, with advertisers but also its eligibility to receive subsidies or donations, can we read in black and white on the RSF website . In other words, the JTI will install a classification of the media - between the good and the bad, sounding the death knell for independent media and risks handicapping the major media which do not comply with the doxa put forward by the certifiers.
An investigation published by the Epoch Times explained that the large-scale application of media labeling, such as that of the American company Newsguard, had resulted in an ideological and biased coverage of the media. The survey revealed that the American start-up gives good marks – that is to say visibility on social media and search engines, access to advertisers, etc. – to media that follow a left-wing or progressive political-media doxa, while bad marks are given to conservative and independent media, even if they adhere to high journalistic standards.
The specifications of RSF's JTI are very close to those of NewsGuard , with RSF also collaborating with NewsGuard since May 2023 to label the news media in Ukraine. Future European legislation, the European Media Freedom Act , also enshrines the use of the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), as a reference for identifying reliable media – opening the door to generalized labeling of the press at European level by relying on on the algorithmic power of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft). Something that we could see happening quite soon in France if the law relating to freedom of communication of 1986 was finally modified by the government, at the end of the EGI.
A desire by the Macron government to regulate information
This is not the government's first attempt. In 2020, a “Désinfox Coronavirus” platform was created on the government website to list newspaper articles deemed “safe and verified”. In response, around thirty editors' companies co-signed a column in which they recalled that "the State is not the arbiter of information" and "that by distinguishing this or that article on its website, the government gives the impression, in a harmful mix of genres, of labeling the production of certain media.”
The column denounced the interventionism of the State: “By singling out this or that article on its site, the government gives the impression, in a deleterious mixture of genres, of labeling the production of certain media. According to this same logic, the others would not be worthy of an imprimatur that the State has no legitimacy to deliver in a country where freedom of the press is a fundamental freedom. »
Questioned by Le Figaro , Arnaud Benedetti, associate professor at Paris-Sorbonne University, declared that "by sorting through press articles, the government is trying to recreate a Ministry of Information" specifying that "when the State claims tell us the truth, he only tells “his” truth… or his lies. » The National Union of Journalists had filed an appeal before the Council of State for the government to delete the page in question, citing a “serious and manifestly illegal attack on the principles of pluralism in the expression of opinions and neutrality of the authorities public”. The page had been removed.
In 2021, Emmanuel Macron tried again to regulate information, by requesting the creation of a commission chaired by sociologist Gérald Bronner, responsible for making proposals in the face of online disinformation. The composition of this commission was quickly criticized, particularly with the presence among its members of a doctor who, “for years and shamelessly”, questioned the tragedy caused by the Mediator.
The Bronner commission, called “Enlightenment in the digital age”, was commissioned by the Élysée to formulate “concrete proposals in the fields of education, regulation, the fight against the spreaders of hatred and the disinformation". Some commentators once again saw it as the “establishment of a ministry of Truth”. The initiative took place in a post-health context where information on the non-natural origin of Covid, the transmission of the virus and the side effects of vaccines raised questions of legitimacy for the government, after a policy imposed on the compulsory health pass , successive confinements and a “whatever it costs” that the French have not finished paying.
This tendency to distrust information published by the media dates back to before the health crisis.
The Ministry of Information already abolished, 43 years ago
The first Ministry of Information appeared in 1940 under the Vichy regime. It is the continuation of the Ministry of Propaganda created in 1938 under Léon Blum. It was guarded in 1942 by the German occupation government, which considerably increased its censorship. It continued to exist after the war until the start of the Fifth Republic, when it was abandoned.
In the 1960s, a decree stipulated that the Ministry of Information was the guarantor of press freedom. Its budget was paid in large part to the press organs, positioning itself as the “manager and distributor of funds […] entirely at the service of freedom of expression”. Named “Ministry of Censorship” by the general public, it intervened directly in the editorial line of television news. Accused of "politicization" and "government control over the television news", Minister Alain Peyrefitte, who held the position from 1962 to 1968, responded on the contrary that the goal was to promote "the images, the facts , objectivity and depoliticization”.
A year after May 68, Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas decided to remove it. It was reestablished in 1972 by Pierre Messmer, to be definitively buried by Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in 1974, after numerous accusations of censorship and interference. The law relating to freedom of communication of 1986 will aim to regulate the audiovisual media by guaranteeing them freedom of expression and by regulating the pluralism of opinions in the media.
Democracy and the pluralism of opinions in question
On March 12, during a hearing in the Senate , the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati declared that she was waiting for the conclusions of the States General of Information in the event of a revision of the law from 1986.
The freedom of expression that our laws protect in France risks being called into question by the introduction of the RSF JTI. The NGO, supposed to defend press freedom and respect for human rights, could become the first gravedigger when its certifiers become the regime's new political commissioners. The new name of this Ministry of Information would then be “information certification”.
As usual, the meaning of words is reversed by the government. To defend freedom of the press, we actually want to limit it; to guarantee media pluralism, we want to censor opinions; in the name of objectivity and non-politicization of information, we want to give media certification to external certifiers, who are just as (if not more) subjective and politicized. By a sleight of hand, this would be the definitive end of the independence of the media from political power.