French press review 11 July 2017

As negotiations continue on the hosting of the 2024 and 2028 Olympic Games, some people are wondering if Paris should be in the race at all. Why has President Emmanuel Macron changed his mind on the timing of tax reform, and who will benefit most? And can American newspapers squeeze more mony out of Google and Facebook?

As the teams from Paris and Los Angeles meet the International Olympic Committee today to help them decide which city gets to host the 2024 Olympics, Libération wonders if the French capital really needs the Games?

Current estimates suggest that hosting the Olympics will cost Paris 6.2 billion euros, involve an enormous series of building projects in the north of the city and oblige the authorities to sell the project to city residents, who have never been consulted.

On its opinion pages, Libé publishes an open letter from a group of writers, political figures, teachers and concerned citizens opposed to the Paris candidature. They say the Games will have a negative economic effect on the country as a whole and will benefit only the international committee and its commercial sponsors.

The signatories point to the withdrawal of Budapest, Rome, Boston, Hamburg and Toronto from the race to host the Games, on the basis that the money could be better spent on social projects. The next host city, Tokyo, went from a provisional budget of six billion euros to a final cost likely to be closer to 16 billion.

France, marked by mass unemployment, social exclusion, poverty, drained by years of austerity, should have other priorities than hosting an event for an organisation which pays no taxes on its profits, they argue.

Paris tried and failed to host the Olympic Games in 1992, 2008 and 2012. The French capital was host city for the summer Olympics in 1924.

Taxing times for the French president

Conservative paper Le Figaro gives the honours to a decision by President Emmanuel Macron to proceed with tax changes. Budgetary difficulties had made a deferral of the changes likely but on Sunday the president decided that keeping promises was more important than making ends meet. His campaign programme will now be applied, and forthwith.

Le Figaro makes two things clear: only the very rich are going to save real money thanks to the changes. And the government is going to have to make up an additional shortfall of between four and five billion euros in this year's budget. To say nothing of the negative impact the changes could have on foreign investment, it says.

The right-wing paper says the president clearly wanted to stop a little fire. But he may, in fact, have set off a huge blaze.

Print media take on internet advertising monopoly

Our colleagues in the American press are going to try to force internet giants Google and Facebook to pay for the use the two websites make of material originated by US newspapers.

According to Le Monde, nearly 2,000 regional and national papers have joined forces to demand a fairer share of the publicity pie, currently being gobbled up by Google and Facebook.

With their combined number of users now reckoned to exceed two billion, the two web companies virtually control the realm of internet publicity. They also manage the way in which news is distributed to the public.

Critics of the web behemoths say they exercise no or insufficient control over their content, allowing for a damaging wave of fake reports.

The alliance says the defence of quality journalism is crucial for the protection of democracy.

An editorial in the New York Times says Google and Facebook represent an even more serious threat to press independence than President Donald Trump. He says the people at the New York Times are losers.

The new press alliance hopes to get the US government to legislate in favour of allowing the newspapers to negotiate collectively with Google and Facebook. That sort of collective front is currently banned by US anti-trust laws.

Animal extinction as bad now as when dinosaurs died

We are living through the sixth great extinction of animal species on a global scale and there are no signs that the phenomenon is slowing down.

According to the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reported in Le Monde, huge numbers of vertebrates are being biologically annihilated both in overall numbers and in the amount of space they occupy.

The authors of the report warn that this setback for fauna could have catastrophic consequences for ecosystems and have huge and unpredictable ecological, economic and social effects.

Species are currently being wiped out one hundred times faster than was the case in the year 1900. Which means that the current rate of extinction is roughly equivalent to that at the end of the dinosaur era, 66 million years ago.