Stick to the contractual framework
And with regard to broadcasting precisely, you should know that by buying the rights several years ago, RTBF also made contractual commitments. It is to this contract that the RTBF will stick, explains the company’s spokesperson, Axelle Pollet. No less, no more. “In terms of marketing, we will do what we have to do according to our contract with FIFA but we will not do more,” she says. This will notably require attention not to make the term “Qatar” a kind of brand. “The goal is to talk about ‘the World Cup’ mainly”. Jean-Paul Philippot, the general administrator, will not make the trip, she adds. “There will be no displacement of the management which usually has meetings with other broadcasters on site. It is a way of marking that we are doing what is necessary for the broadcast but no more.”
“We are totally in our role and our public service missions”, she also insists. “It is important for a public media to give access to a major sporting event for free to as many people as possible. It is important to remember this and to get out of the current context of sensitivity.”
And there is, she specifies, a continuity with the previous choices: “It seems consistent with our missions which are first of all to support the great sporting moments – we have done it for other events such as the Olympic Games in China recently or the previous Cup in Russia. We followed it in as a sporting event but we have always also followed it from an information point of view, that is to say to decipher the aberrations or the questions that this type of competition can bring, whether from a point of view ecological, or freedom of the press, or whatever.”
There remains the question, she concludes, of the follow-up to be given to current questions.
Review the key to the Info broadcast on the TV news on November 17, 2022:
