ABSTRACT
France has created the most unstable set of broadcasting institutions in Europe, if not the world. They have suffered crisis after crisis since the beginning of radio in 1924 in an endless and fruitless search for a point of equilibrium; no one can say with confidence that even now any enduring principle has been established in structure or programme content. In the 1920s France's radio stations were run either by departments of national and local government, or specially licensed private bodies, under a law of November 1923. The unions announced that they possessed some hundreds of documents which would show systematically how the leading politicians of the Republic had been leaning on the ORTF to distort the flow of news, and manipulate public opinion. French broadcasting in half a century had found no neutral ground, no neutral institutions, and no neutral men.
