Public broadcasting in France : when transparency can vanish by procedural decree
A few months ago, I wrote about parliamentary commissions of inquiry as the French art of burying scandals. The diagnosis was harsh: these commissions do their work, produce reports, formulate recommendations, and nothing happens. The failure is downstream, the report that gathers dust in a drawer, the recommendation nobody follows.
What I hadn’t fully grasped back then is that there is a pathology even more radical than ineffectiveness. There is a mechanism by which the work itself can disappear. Not merely be ignored. Disappear.
With the commission of inquiry into public broadcasting (France’s equivalent of a congressional or select-committee investigation) having just held its final hearing on April 8, 2026, and the report from its rapporteur, Charles Alloncle, expected for late April, this question isn’t abstract. It’s being raised right now, in the coming weeks.
What “media frenzy” reveals without meaning to
Charles Alloncle, rapporteur of the commission of inquiry into the neutrality, operation, and financing of public broadcasting, recently complained of a “media frenzy” against him and his work. Interviewed on RMC (a national news-talk radio station) with circus music playing in the background, he cited seventy hearings and nearly three hundred people heard. Figures that say something about the volume of work done, though they tell us nothing about its depth, since a commission can just as easily hear three hundred people who came to defend their own turf as deliver revelations.
Circus music is nothing new in the history of French commissions of inquiry, and it has to be said that not all of them deserve to be spared it. Some are indeed political instruments, and skepticism is the appropriate response to them. What makes the present case more complicated is that the “circus” criticism didn’t come only from the media or from the public-broadcasting executives who were heard. It also came from within: Jérémie Patrier-Leitus, the commission’s chair, himself denounced on several occasions a “democracy of spectacle,” a “sad spectacle,” a drift toward a “political tribunal.” He went so far as to declare on RTL (another national radio station), on April 6: “I wasn’t elected to take part in this circus.” This self-criticism from the chair, who isn’t the rapporteur and whose political interests diverge from Alloncle’s, says something important: the procedural problem is real and acknowledged even by those who don’t share the rapporteur’s conclusions. Which doesn’t invalidate the structural analysis. On the contrary: if even the internal players agree in calling the commission a spectacle, the temptation to let its work vanish into indifference is only reinforced.
But the media reflex illustrates something more general: the tendency to discredit the approach rather than dispute the facts, that ritual of the journalist-as-prosecutor that consists of neutralizing the other party rather than answering the substance. This reflex isn’t specific to this commission. It’s structural.
What is, on the other hand, structurally different, and infinitely more serious than the ordinary theater of French political debate, is the thing nobody really says: all of this work, whatever its quality and its conclusions, can legally disappear from the public sphere. And relaying it can become a criminal offense.
The mechanism nobody names
Let’s take a moment to measure what that sentence means in concrete terms.
Elected officials of the Republic, mandated by Parliament, spent six months questioning public-broadcasting executives about the use of taxpayers’ money. These exchanges took place. They were filmed, transcribed, archived. Some were broadcast live on LCP, France’s parliamentary channel (the equivalent of C-SPAN). And there is a legal mechanism that makes it possible to remove these exchanges from the public sphere and to criminally prohibit anyone from relaying them.
This mechanism isn’t the result of a conspiracy. It’s the result of an ordinary procedural rule of French parliamentary law: the ordinance of November 17, 1958 makes the publicity of a commission of inquiry’s work conditional on the publication of its report. If the report isn’t adopted or isn’t published within the allotted time (six months maximum for the entire proceedings), the hearings fall under the regime of secrecy. Their content becomes confidential. And relaying it exposes you to criminal prosecution.
This isn’t an anomaly in the system. It’s the system working exactly as it was designed to.
The essential point, which the lay reader easily misses: the secrecy isn’t a sanction handed down by someone. It’s the automatic consequence of a non-event, that is, the absence of a vote, the absence of a majority, the absence of any adoption of the report. Nobody presses a button. Nobody formally decides to bury anything. It’s enough for nothing to happen. The French Parliament has written into its own architecture a self-destruct switch for its inquiries: inaction produces erasure. That’s no small thing. It’s the deliberate choice of a default regime in which opacity is the resting position, and transparency the exception that demands an active effort to exist.
Conditional transparency
Public broadcasting in France represents roughly four billion euros in annual funding. Part of that sum is justified by missions the market doesn’t finance on its own: territorial presence, pluralism, the French-speaking world, accessibility. It isn’t the principle of public broadcasting that’s in question here. It’s the absence of any real oversight of how it’s used, the possible capture of its editorial lines, and the structural lack of effective checks and balances.
What the procedural mechanism protects isn’t, in fact, just an abstract editorial line. It’s a concrete way of running things: production contracts, choice of suppliers, pay levels, the balance between public-service missions and internalized market logic. The hearings brought specific facts to light: average salaries well above the standards of the comparable private sector, renovations at outsized cost, structural deficits taken as a given. These facts now exist in the public sphere. If the report isn’t published, they will no longer exist there. This public rent-seeking will recover its normal operating opacity, protected not by an active effort at concealment, but by the simple return of the system to its resting position.
The question of how this money is used, what editorial directions follow from it, and whose interests are served by these choices, is a legitimate question that any citizen who funds this system is entitled to ask, precisely because it’s public money allocated to missions of general interest.
A parliamentary commission of inquiry is precisely the mechanism meant to answer this kind of question within the institutional framework. It summons, it questions, it documents. It holds prerogatives that journalists don’t: the people heard testify under oath, on penalty of criminal sanctions.
But if this mechanism can be neutralized by the non-publication of a report, then it isn’t really a transparency tool. It’s a conditional transparency whose conditions are controlled by political players who are never neutral toward the subject of the inquiry, whether it’s partisan calculation, inertia, the lack of a majority to adopt a hard-hitting report, or more diffuse balances of power with a media sector whose connections cut across every camp. The very “neutrality” that the commission’s title makes its object of inquiry is precisely what is at stake in the decision itself to publish or not.
The structural irony
The media that live off freedom of the press and make it their reason for existing are the same ones whose funding and editorial choices can legally be shielded from public scrutiny by a parliamentary mechanism. Public broadcasting (France Télévisions, Radio France, France Médias Monde) claims its editorial independence as a democratic safeguard, while ARCOM, the country’s broadcasting regulator (akin to Ofcom or the FCC), supposedly its guarantor, is drifting toward other agendas. But that editorial independence, under current conditions, comes paired with an ability to resist public scrutiny of its financial management if the procedural conditions aren’t met.
The circus music RMC played in the background during Alloncle’s hearing fits, consciously or not, into a logic of trivialization. If you convince enough people that the commission is nothing but a political spectacle (which it can in fact sometimes be), you make less visible, and even less troubling, the possibility that its work disappears without a trace. Not through a conspiracy. Through collective inertia, through gradual disinterest, through the absence of enough pressure for a hard-hitting report to be adopted and published.
What the architecture of the system reveals
The real question isn’t whether this commission’s report will be published. It’s why a democratic system saw fit to equip itself with a mechanism that allows the result of a parliamentary inquiry into publicly funded institutions to be made to legally disappear.
The answer doesn’t lie in the malice of those who designed the system. It lies in the logic of institutional systems, which naturally tend to protect themselves.
This logic doesn’t stop at the doors of Parliament. We find it identically in the way the regulation of the media and digital space has progressively been shifted toward bodies that universal suffrage can neither elect nor remove. ARCOM is drifting toward a role of editorial censor that its original mission never assigned it. The European DSA outsources to Brussels decisions about what may or may not circulate in the French digital public sphere. In both cases, the movement is the same: the power of control leaves the democratic arena (where it can be contested, overturned, put to a vote) and settles into technical and procedural architectures that place it beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. This is what Ellul called “technique” as an autonomous system: not the machine in the crude sense, but the whole set of mechanisms that substitute themselves for the political while claiming to neutralize it in the name of competence and efficiency. The parliamentary commission of inquiry, in this framework, isn’t an anomaly to be fixed: it’s a remnant of direct democracy that the system tolerates as long as it remains without consequence.
Secrecy as the default regime, publicity as a conditional exception, criminal sanction as a closing instrument, delegation to unelected bodies as the natural horizon: these are coherent architectural choices. They reveal a precise conception of what democratic oversight should, and should not, be able to reach.
In my previous article, I closed on the image of democratic theater: you pretend to investigate, the report comes out, the recommendations are forgotten. What this commission exposes is something more fundamental. We’ve built a system in which the play can be performed, the curtains drawn, and the house returned to darkness, legally, cleanly, without anyone being formally in the wrong.
That’s exactly why it’s revealing. Not because something exceptional is happening. But because the system is working exactly as it was designed to.
“We are perfectly familiar with highly democratic governments that give the impression of being authoritarian, and conversely with dictatorial governments that know how to manufacture the opinion they need in order to be perceived as democratic.”
Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion (1965)