The Grand Duchy has an exceptional and particularly dynamic media landscape. This is mainly thanks to a media-friendly government policy that introduced the first press aid in 1976 under Prime Minister Gaston Thorn. In the audiovisual sector, this financial aid exists since 1991. A new media law will soon be voted in the Chamber of Deputies.
The former aid was limited to the print media, to which the audiovisual sector was added later. Meanwhile we are increasingly moving towards paperless media, as we are following our newspapers and other media more and more digitally.
Furthermore, it is our duty to ensure pluralism and independence of media. We are in a paradigm shift. The core of the project is to focus on professional journalism and no longer on the type or number of pages printed – just as it was set in the coalition agreement in 2018. More specifically, it is about valuing journalists and their work. There should be professional journalists doing objective and good quality journalism.
For the transition, the government introduced a regulation in 2017 to support the development of the online press. However, by now it is definitely time for the reform to enter into force.
The fact that we have multilingual media in Luxembourg is a good thing. That way our foreign fellow citizens can benefit from quality journalism in a language they understand. This is exactly what makes our media landscape so exceptional.
