Morbihan will have its own departmental television, «Demain Sud Bretagne », from next spring, and we can only be glad to note such development for the audiovisual media in Brittany, which creates a few jobs and a new communication space dedicated to «local» issues.
However, if one compares Brittany's situation with that of the other European regions with a similar strong identity, one has to be rather disappointed: Brittany is one of the few European regions that doesn't have its own television channel for its whole territory. This lack of audiovisual media has obvious negative consequences in economic, cultural and linguistic terms.
In return, Brittany will have a bunch of local televisions, with very limited budgets, thus fragmenting, the impact of audiovisual creation as well as information. Unless with an extremely important budget effort, out of reach for those structures, such local televisions will not be able to provide the service that a real public television for the five Breton departments would bring.
This incapacity to set up an audiovisual medium able to produce quality documentaries and fictions and to inform the whole concerned population is a real Breton exception in Europe.
Without reaching at once the level of a television channel as it exists in Wales, there are alternate solutions such as the Corsican channel Via Stella (15 hours of daily programmes, 30% in Corsican, a live cultural show at 6 pm, documentaries, youth programmes, music, Corsican news every 3 hours, political debates...) See also (voir notre article)
The Breton exception in this matter is also linked to the almost absolute lack of interest of the Breton councillors for audiovisual matters, and their inability to negotiate with the state and France Televisions in order to set up a real general interest audiovisual service for the 5 Breton departments. For the Breton Party, it is a major fault on their part which hinders the economic, cultural and linguistic development in Brittany.
For the Morbihan federation of the Breton Party,
Jacques-Yves Le Touze
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