Riadh Ferjani, Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information, Université de Tunis-Manouba, Tunisie
« Political economy of communication and public sphere : Tunisia as a Case Study »

Samuel Lelièvre, Atelier Fiwe, Paris, Film-Art-Culture, Laval, France
«The CMI in Post-Apartheid South Africa: the Example of the National Film and Video Foundation »
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Isabelle Pailliart, Hélène Romeyer, Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3 - GRESEC, France
«Changes of public information: the case of health»

Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, CNRS - Laboratoire Communication et Politique, Institut des Sciences Politiques - Centre d’Histoire, Paris, France
« Television, national and international debate, history – memory »

« The development of free press and the consequences for the public sphere »

Roger Delbarre
Université Paris 13, LabSIC, MSH Paris Nord, France

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« Political economy of communication and public sphere : Tunisia as a Case Study »

Riadh Ferjani
Institut de Presse et des Sciences de l’Information, Université de Tunis-Manouba, Tunisie

The present contribution proposes to address the conditions of adapting a Political Communication Economy approach in a public space that is plural but strongly dominated by the State. Since the late 1980s, the evolution of the media context and, more particularly, the audio-visual context has belonged in the paradoxical. Indeed, while attempting to take into consideration—under various registers—the changes occurring in the field of usages, and the economic stakes related to its losing monopoly over broadcasting, the State continues to manage the audio-visual media as a social institution allowing it to ensure hegemony over society as a whole.

Our study will seek to take into account the two-fold relationship of merchandisation: indeed, apart from its internationalisation, it is an industrialisation process, i.e. a process of ensuring return on national media that are interconnected to trans-border actors. However, in view of the current configuration of the public space, the economic return of a constantly changing sector remains quite uncertain. This is due to the existence of several competing social logics which are applied by actors whose leverage in influencing the context remains unequal. 

This contribution proposes to address these various logics which, for purposes of the study, will be grouped under 3 headings:

• - The institutional uncertainty with regard to public policies characterised by a selective deregulation which, in spite of a plethoric production, still remains out of step with the diversity of Tunisian society;
• - Adjustments between the national and the international revolve around imitation, purchase or adaptation of concepts of entertainment with a high mercantile dimension but which may bring in a discourse that is discordant with the official discourse;
• - The tactics deployed by the audiences/users to access audio-visual media, gain exposure to them, evade or bypass them are no longer marginal practices confined to the home context but seem to belong in logics of claiming speech in the public space.
  

«The CMI in Post-Apartheid South Africa: the Example of the National Film and Video Foundation»

Samuel Lelièvre
Atelier Fiwe, Paris, Film-Art-Culture, Laval, France

South Africa is the only country of sub-Saharan Africa to have developed a film industry in a sense which one usually gives to this term. However, this industry was ideologically manipulated by the political regimes and the system of apartheid since the middle of the 20th century. With the upheavals which intervened as of the end of the Eighties and the introduction of the democracy in 1994, this powerful film and audio-visual industry – it was joined by television at the end of the Seventies – entered a phase of reorganization, which is still in progress. This reorganization was set up through the writing of a White Paper by a committee of experts, which led to the creation in 1999 of the National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF) by the South-African government – No 73 of 1997: National Film and Video Foundation Act, of the "South-African Official Journal". Consequently, the objective of this institution is "to create an environment which develops and makes the promotion of film and audio-visual industry on the national and international level". While being focused more particularly on the role of training and with regards to recent transformations, this communication suggests to recall the historical, political and social framework having led to setting-up the NFVF, to account for the scepticism of the White Paper authors, as well as to describe the action of the NFVF and the critiques this institution used to confront. In doing so, it is also a question of putting in perspective the NFVF within the South-African context, in particular through the relationship with televisions (SABC, M-Net, etc.), the relationship with the immediate socio-cultural environment or with the external world. This communication is based on the research conducted while in a two-years post-doctoral position in South Africa and developed thereafter towards the cinema and the audio-visual in this country.

«Changes of public information: the case of health»

Isabelle Pailliart, Hélène Romeyer
Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3 - GRESEC, France

The objective of this communication is to analyze the transformations of public information, under the impulse in particular of the new techniques of communication. Public information follows a long tradition of the State which consists in to product and to provide to "citizens" data resulting from great national surveys. Those results either concern the fields of intervention of the State or of statistics, enriching in the same way the piloting and controlling tools of Society (social protection, renewal of the generations...). The diffusion, generally free, of this information remains a prerogative of the State. If public information appears as a political resource to which political leaders resort to legitimate a decision (the cost of the retirements, the number of the civil servants, figures of the delinquency), it also includes other uses, within the framework of prevention (road accidents, cancers and nicotinism), in order to support behavior evolution. This kind of information fits well in three fields of the action of the State: public policies (and forms of rationalities of the public action that information offers), the political relation between political leaders and citizens, the implementation of collective conduits (and the standardization of those). Within this framework, the sector of health seems to us particularly interesting to observe. Traditionally, the health information used to be part at the same time of this public information and of the scientific information. As public information, it fits fully in the procedure of the public policies; as scientific information, it must answer the precise criteria of evaluation and diffusion of the scientific community. However, this information of health knows a complex movement of “publicisation “which questions the significance of the public aspect of information.

Indeed, several changes are in progress. Initially, medical public information is marked by a movement of "privatization". This expression includes the intervention of actors of the economic sphere and also indicates a movement of privatization by the individuals themselves: it means the use, in the private sphere and for strictly individualized objectives, of medical information. Eventually, this movement of privatization is accompanied by forms of merchandizing of public information. This one becomes a commercial stake in more than one way. If the financial stakes of medical information are not new, they are accentuated and using new methods.

Then, the medical data carriers are increasing and now its production escapes from the only scientific field. With the multiplication of the authorities of production and diffusion (pharmaceutical laboratories, insurances, associations of patients, research centers, and public institutions), the statute of this information is diversifying (practical information, councils, promotion of such or such drug, account-returned scientific...).

Lastly, this sector knows also a questioning of the terms of authority, or an extension in the medical sphere of militant behaviors specific to the political sphere: development of "alternative" information, publicized expressions of the individuals, refusal of the statutes and expertise only legitimated by those...

It acts thus, through the study of the sector of health, to question the perenniality of the public character of information.

«Television, national and international debate, history – memory»

Isabelle Veyrat-Masson
CNRS - Laboratoire Communication et Politique, Institut des Sciences Politiques - Centre d’Histoire, Paris, France

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