When the Ideological Minority Eclipse the Identity and Linguistic Majorities (Case of Moroccan media)

The lifting of the State monopoly in 2002 enabled the liberalization of the Moroccan audiovisual sector to enter into its operational phase with the granting of the first licenses of the private radio and television services. This change in the liberalized audiovisual sector was intended to be a new milestone in democratic construction and, above all, to be a crucial step in the process of political openness by guaranteeing political pluralism and cultural diversity at the level of the sphere of the audiovisual media.

The objective of this work is to identify and address the impact of liberalization tools on the promotion of cultural and regional specificities in the face of conservative (religious or identity) ideologies in the different poles of the media landscape (public vs. private / TV vs Radio / digital vs classic).

Thus, we will focus on the analysis of three aspects of liberalization:

1) The role of law provisions and their level of involvement in the process of linguistic and cultural equality in the media space,

2) The role of regulation, co-regulation and self-regulation and all the media actors in the construction of grids for local radio and television programs,

3) The importance of measurement aggregates to analyze the potential gap between supply and demand for audiovisual content based on an analysis of audience data.

To answer these different aspects, we will base ourselves on the Laws, specifications of the Moroccan radios and televisions, the thematic reports of the operators, data’s of audience measurement as well as an immersion in the writing of two regional operators.

From a methodological point of view, this research is in the wake of studies on reception, the uses of the media, in particular the founding works of the currents "cultural studies" and "uses and rewards".