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The excessive liberalisation of the French press is held by some to have contributed to the "decadence" that crippled the Third Republic in the 1930s. Raymond Kuhn suggests that towards the end of the Third Republic in the late 1930s, abuses of the Press Law's freedoms "contribute[d] to the destabilisation of the political system when economic crisis and political scandal rocked the regime."
I'm not sure what this refers to. The "decadence" was well established in the 1880s. Richard Thomson at the Edinburgh College of Art seems to argue that the 1881 law allowed the younger generation to openly question the republic and criticize its corruption. I could be reading this wrong, but Kuhn seems to be blaming the victims of bad government for questioning their government. We saw this same criticism play out in the US with the election of Reagan as a counterpoint to the supposed excesses of the 1960s counterculture and liberal media laws, which Reagan rewrote and repealed. However it was Reagan and his minions who were directly responsible for the bad government in the first place and who created the roadmap for the rise of Trump and the "decadence" of late stage capitalism. In other words, the liberalism of the 1960s, including its media laws, made the public critique of government possible, and allowed the public to call for greater reforms and petition the government for change. Conservatives didn’t like this, because it meant they had to cut profits and deal with externalities, so they rewrote the media laws to allow corporate propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation to flood the public with nonsense, as well as deregulating the media to allow billionaires to control the flow of information. Something tells me that Kuhn’s take on this is wrong and other voices are needed here. Viriditas (talk) 00:11, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
