The French youth, it seems, are giving up on newspapers at such an alarming rate that last week the government announced a radical plan to bring them back into the fold:  it is spending millions of euros to give 18 to 24 year olds across the country free subscriptions to 59 publications from Le Monde and Le Figaro to the global edition of The New York Times.

Mon dieu! That the state cares about the newspaper industry enough to subsidise such a project (the newspapers must provide the papers for free and the government will pay for the distribution) seems rather stunning from South Africa, where one gets the distinct feeling that our ruling elite secretly believe they could rather do without the pesky press.

If you’ve ever had to elicit answers out of a government spokesman, you’ll know that since the advent of the Mbeki era most are at best shambolic; at worst completely evasive. “Well, you’ll have to send an e-mail,” is the mantra, followed a while later by: “We have no comment.”

Every now and again the view that the media in South Africa needs to step away from the Western tradition of an adversarial Fourth Estate rears its head. We need to find our own African way, it is said.  And this is not solely from ANC apparatchiks but also from journalism academics.

By and large, African media is not setting much of an example. A former colleague who attended Wits University’s conference on investigative journalism last week told me that at an awards ceremony for gumshoe hacks across the continent, the flavour of the month seemed to be tobacco smuggling in West Africa. You’d think that the fact that most of West Africa is run by oligarchs would occupy the pages of their papers.

So, yes indeed, the British and American tradition of nailing the bastards for corruption and double-talk is a fine one – and in the more far-flung provinces of our land like the Eastern Cape where I live, the press is often all that stands between the citizens and the kleptocrats in the provincial government.

And this, it appears, is at the heart of the young people of France losing interest in reading papers. Many view the French press with suspicion and, according to a report in The Guardian earlier this year, the French have little respect for their newspapers “in a climate where politicians rewrite their own interviews for publication and the president’s powerful business friends, from construction to arms manufacturing, own several major papers or TV stations”…. TO READ MY FULL COLUMN AT MONEYWEB, CLICK HERE.

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