Economic Life : global capital,financial journalism,and independent media

Global capital and financial journalism

This article examines financial journalism in Morocco during the 1990s, focusing on the tenure of Servan-Schreiber at LVE from 1991 to 1997 and the entrance of global capital into Morocco’s media market. While evident in the purchase of a Moroccan financial newspaper by a European press magnate, the most significant role played by global capital comes in the form of advertising from transnational corporations, which expanded rapidly at LVE under Servan-Schreiber. Shifting forms of ownership and capital allowed for relatively more flexibility in a media system heavily oriented toward partisan and state publications. Servan-Schreiber’s management included substantial wage increases, which played a role in reorienting journalism away from partisan ideological frameworks and toward business-friendly liberalism. During this time, he used financial journalism and the government’s need for transparent economic liberalization as an entry point into broader coverage of Morocco that took the paper in an increasingly generalist direction, broaching topics in politics and society among others. ¹ This boundary-pushing approach at a time when politics in particular was largely absent from Moroccan media outside established partisan channels bleeds over into the taboo-challenging publications started by his protégés during a period of political transition. I argue that financial journalism set the stage for a commercialization of independent media in Morocco that is characterized by recognition of media’s role as both a facilitator for global capital and an increasingly powerful player in the realm of geopolitics. Additionally, on the domestic front, the economic press paves the way for the reentry of politics into public discourse and a liberal approach that attempts to work within the constraints of capital while not eschewing critique.

The monarchy and its allies instrumentalized neoliberal reforms in accordance with their interests, specifically by taking advantage of opportunities to extend their authority in the economic realm, giving rise to what Yesil (2016) has called ‘the authoritarian neoliberal state’ marked by a combination of statist and commercial impulses oriented toward the global marketplace and its intersection with ruling elites. Here the concept of the authoritarian neoliberal state is useful in thinking through a shift in the way power is orchestrated. Economic liberalization set in motion deep structural transformations in Moroccan society, and yet neoliberal reforms have not resulted in the withdrawal of the state. Rather in large part these reforms result in the removal of major economic functions from parliament and their re-embedding in semipublic entities, private companies, or associations close to the monarchy, even as many of these continue to draw on state funds. This draws on a management ethos embodied in Mohammed VI’s references to an ‘executive monarchy’, ministries filled with technocrats, and numerous megaprojects undertaken in the name of growth.

Cultural industries are implicated in this reorientation toward capital across multiple levels: as industries themselves, as vehicles for capital and investor confidence, as generators of discourse and voices on the world stage. As Yudice (2004) points out, recognition of culture’s expediency in a global era has given media both a privileged place in state strategy and unremarkable fragility in the face of market logics, resulting in a deeply held ambivalence toward reform. For Moroccan independent media in the 1990s, the mutual fragility of media industries and the state created the conditions of possibility for strategic alliances, innovation, and debate. Sassen (2006) has argued that an overlooked dimension of globalization is the way processes and transformations inside the nation participate in its disassembly as the sole order and authority. What LVE demonstrates is a shift in orientation toward global capital that transforms state power at the same time that media become a mechanism for producing a discourse of Moroccan exceptionalism and transition to democracy.

Postcolonial economic policy, the makhzen, and media

In order to understand the significance of changes in Moroccan media accompanying economic liberalization, it is necessary to consider what preceded these changes. Morocco’s 44 years (1912–1956) as a French (and to a lesser extent, Spanish) protectorate produced structural transformations in its economy, politics and culture, resulting in ties that endured post-independence. Largely aligned with the West during the Cold War, postcolonial economic governance was a mix of market-driven and state developmental policies (Catusse, 2011). In the 1970s King Hassan II set out to ‘Moroccanize’ the economy, transforming the monarchy into what Leveau (1976) has called ‘the premier private entrepreneur in Morocco’ (p. 257), and transferring majority foreign-owned assets to political allies. This resulted in ‘thirty-six major families who controlled two-thirds of the moroccanized economy; suddenly, Morocco became a country with a sizeable class of multimillionaires’ (Miller, 2012). These multimillionaires, including the monarchy, were in a prime position to profit from later economic liberalization.

However, in the domain of politics the monarchy’s position was not always so certain. The monarchy was a symbol of the nationalist cause, but after independence it competed with nationalist party Istiqlal for power. Through strategic maneuvering the monarchy constructed a multi-party system with itself at the head of the army, government, and religion (Waterbury, 1970; Wyrtzen, 2015). In doing so it formed key alliances, leading to the rise of the makhzen, which refers to a power bloc composed of the monarchy and aligned notables in various sectors, understood to be the real center of power in Morocco. The country’s 10 governments between 1955 and 1965 demonstrate that this was an incredibly contested process that only ended when Hassan II declared a state of exception. This was the beginning of what is referred to as ‘the Years of Lead’, a nearly 30-year period of widespread violence against dissidents, particularly the Left.

As a multiparty state post-independence Morocco has had relatively greater diversity of voices in its public sphere than many regional neighbors. Generally, media have been divided into three categories: the partisan press, state media associated with the makhzen, and independent media. Here ‘independent’ refers lack of state involvement and lack of affiliation with political parties, which is how I use the term. This lack of institutional support made independent outlets particularly vulnerable in a system where economic and political power were increasingly concentrated around the monarchy, and where the press code prohibited foreign investment and ownership. Significantly, by the end of the Years of Lead, the independent press had been effectively eliminated, with Leftist publications in particular targeted by harassment, seizures, and the arrest of key figures.

Financial journalism from Eurexpansion to Economic Life

One of the key figures in this analysis is Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, a French journalist and businessman from a prominent family of press magnates and politicians. In 1967 he started the monthly business magazine L’Expansion and proceeded over the next 30 years to create a financial press conglomerate aimed at executives and managers. In 1989, on the eve of Europe’s integration into a single economic community, Servan-Schreiber launched Eurexpansion, a network of locally-situated financial publications covering newly mobile capital in a way that was less niche and therefore able to compete for a general audience. Above all Servan-Schreiber approached his work as a businessman, frequently taking on new projects, strategizing improvement and innovation, and making responsiveness to markets and audiences essential.

Among many countries in the process of economic liberalization, Morocco’s proximity to Europe made it an advantageous economic partner. Servan-Schreiber had married Moroccan journalist Perla Danan in 1987 and was close to André Azoulay, an economic advisor to the king charged with promoting Morocco’s image abroad. Through these connections, Servan-Schreiber invested in LVE in 1991. In a Moroccan media landscape dominated by partisan publications deeply invested in nationalist projects, Servan-Schreiber’s goal of internationalization, status as a businessman and experimental approach set him apart. While there had clearly been European interests and money in Moroccan media before, the speed and scale of Servan-Schreiber’s Eurexpansion network, which comprised 50 titles in 15 countries after 2 years, marked a new stage in capital investments and integration.

On September 16, 1991 LVE published a special edition under the headline ‘Interview with His Majesty the King’ (Servan-Schreiber, 1991a). At the same time a new box appeared on the paper’s masthead indicating ‘Member of the EUREXPANSION network’. This agreement is in effect a metaphor for what the king is marketing in his interview and Servan-Schreiber is cheerleading with his investment: a closer economic relationship between Morocco and Europe on the eve of the European Union going into effect, and at a time when Morocco was looking to jump start privatization and foreign investment. Given that Morocco’s press code made it illegal for a foreigner to own a Moroccan publication, and that the monarchy’s policy since independence had been to give interviews only to international outlets, this special edition – and the investment and interview that led to it – represents a new phase in media ownership and financing, as well as media-state relations in Morocco.

LVE, founded in 1957 and taken over by Marcel Herzog in 1975, was relatively alone on the independent weekly scene, most likely protected by its economic focus and proximity to power given Herzog worked closely with the king’s cousin, government minister and state press baron Moulay Ahmed Alaoui (El Farah, 2017). It is clear that Servan-Schreiber’s participation was negotiated at the highest levels, given that it was openly advertised and he received an interview with the king. These events communicate two things: that the king is above the law and that Servan-Schreiber is in a privileged position to amplify his voice among a particularly desirable international business community. It is also clear that undertaking unpopular economic reforms and seeking to manage an abysmal human rights record coincides with a shift from systematic repression of media to a more ambivalent approach. Amidst pressure from human rights groups and international institutions a monarchic politics of appearances develops that seeks to works through media rather than against it.

The monarchy does not give interviews to the Moroccan press, but at this point Servan-Schreiber was not really the Moroccan press and the interview was simultaneously published in seven European business dailies affiliated with Eurexpansion (Servan-Schreiber, 1991b). The interview is 17 pages, with each page featuring the same photo of the king. Particularly telling is a photo published with the interview that shows King Hassan II at the head of a low table flanked by two arm chairs and two parallel couches (Servan-Schreiber, 1991a: 17). In the armchair to his right sits Servan-Schreiber with his wife, Perla Danan, beside him on the couch. On the opposite couch sit Moulay Ahmed Alaoui, Hassan II’s cousin, minister of state and founder of Maroc Soir Groupe; Fouad Filali, Hassan II’s son-in-law and CEO of royal holding company ONA/SNI; and Driss Basri, Hassan II’s interior minister, information minister and right-hand man, closely associated with violence and repression of dissidents during the Years of Lead. All of this suggests that Morocco is proceeding with economic liberalization, but without fundamental changes to structures of power. The men in the photo symbolize the unprecedented concentration of political and economic power around the monarchy, while the inclusion of Basri in particular suggests continuing authoritarian tendencies in an era of economic opening. The incorporation of transnational media into this picture in the form of Servan-Schreiber illustrates a new player in the (geo)political arena, as well as new opportunities for cultural industries when media and state interests are aligned. This is indicative of a new approach to appearances and public relations by the regime in accordance with an increasingly mediated world, while the presence of the old guard suggest little fundamental reorganization in the interest of democratization.

Economic Life renewed

One of the most interesting things about LVE under Servan-Schreiber is that it did not stick to the economy, nor even particularly close to the establishment line. Its value for the regime was based in the person of Servan-Schreiber and his access to elites, certainly, but also the independence from which it derived its legitimacy. In this context critiques lent credence to assertions about a remarkable reversal in human rights and civil liberties, which along with economic liberalization, were presented as a modernization project in the interests of democratization. All of this participates in producing a discourse of Moroccan exceptionalism tied to stability, peaceful reform, and advances in civil liberties. Through this conjuncture possibilities develop for deeper social and political analysis through an economic lens that both work for the state, but also work to subtly speak back to it.

When Servan-Schreiber invested in LVE, its readers were reassured that it would remain largely the same. But 3 years later the ambitious project that was Eurexpansion had imploded and Servan-Schreiber was forced to ceded control of the company (L’Expansion, 1994). As a result, he purchased the remaining capital in LVE in 1994 and within 2 years substantially reoriented the publication, bringing his brand of accessible financial journalism to LVE. The publication’s more generalist direction was evident in its new slogan ‘even more than the economy’, intimating that the financial weekly intended to broaden its scope and compete with the mainstream press. In taking control of LVE, Servan-Schreiber brought onboard new journalists and some big-name columnists like Tahar Ben Jelloun and Fatima Mernissi. More women were featured in the paper’s male-dominated pages and eventually a women’s page appeared. Stories on privatization and market reports were increasingly paired with coverage of culture and sports. This period also saw growth in advertising by transnational corporations, particularly banks, airlines and real estate projects, but also increasingly from consumer goods manufacturers like car, electronics and beverage companies. ² Frequently the paper would devote special sections to a particular region or industry, for which it would solicit targeted advertisements, as with a section devoted to Rabat and Kenitra (Rabat, 1996) or an extensive special section on private education (Spécial: Enseignement privé, 1994). Promotion and catering to major players in the Moroccan economy is accompanied by advertising purchases and the right of response to coverage in the paper. While in 1991 LVE was only 30 pages or so with 9 pages of legal notices, which appeared to be its primary advertising base, by 1994 it regularly exceed 60 pages with the number of legal notices declining while full-page color ads for consumer goods increased.

In May 1996 LVE ran a two-page spread on the inside cover to publicize the paper’s redesign. The left page displayed LVE’s new ad campaign, a full page with the top half a gray block dominated by a photo of a cat and the bottom half a white block featuring LVE’s red logo and the slogan ‘even more than the economy’ (La Vie Économique [LVE], 1996: 2). The page is bisected by several lines of white type against a black background proclaiming ‘At Economic Life, we call this animal a cat’ (LVE, 1996: 2). This slogan, based on the idiom ‘to call a cat a cat’, means to call something as it is or to speak plainly. This, plus the black-and-white color scheme, suggest an uncompromising approach to coverage that goes beyond pretenses and at odds with a media system where official narratives had long been privileged.

On the opposite page LVE’s new masthead and table of contents occupy the top half of the page with an editorial by Servan-Schreiber titled ‘A Renewed “Economic Life”’ underneath (Servan-Schreiber, 1996: 3). In the editorial Servan-Schreiber speaks frankly about the transformation of LVE over the 2 years since he took control. This transparency about funding, performance, and LVE as a project and its goals is remarkable in a system where media are often opaquely tied to centers of power. Servan-Schreiber lauds LVE’s circulation growth from 13,000 to 20,000, 26% growth in advertising the previous year and its position as the ‘first French-language weekly of Morocco. First in readers, first in advertising revenue’ (Servan-Schreiber, 1996: 3). Perhaps most remarkable, however, is the direct discussion about the context in which Servan-Schreiber and LVE are operating. In the words of Servan-Schreiber:

‘At the time when I took on this paper, I was told that in Morocco, politics was the prerogative of the subsidized partisan press, and that it was no accident that the independent weeklies were confined to the economy. This was as a precaution. Yet, at the same time, in the circles of power, I was assured that the Kingdom needed a professional press, free in tone, and not subservient. I decided to believe it, armed with my own thirty years of experience in journalism in France, which for me forged two convictions. On the one hand, that a country is only fully developed when it has modern news media. On the other hand, that the best proof of a political regime’s democratic intentions is that it leaves the press alone to deal with all that decency allows, including subjects that embarrass governments.

As a function of this, I encouraged La Vie Économique’s journalists to become real ‘pros,’ and, at the same time, to open up our topics to politics, societal issues, international news, and to culture’ (Servan-Schreiber, 1996: 3).

These few paragraphs penned by Servan-Schreiber about his work at LVE are telling in several ways. First, they indicate a prevailing wisdom about topics that are off limits and those limits being linked to funding and ultimately existence for media organizations. Second, they indicate Servan-Schreiber’s proximity and access to the circles of power, which reassured him that he would be able to operate independently, albeit while echoing the common refrain that a critical or uncooperative press is an unprofessional one. Third, they establish his decision to believe these assurances and adopt a try-and-see attitude to covering a wide array of topics, including politics. Fourth, they tie Morocco’s status as developed and its entry into modernity, as well as the democratic intentions of its leaders, to the ability of his newspaper to operate without limits.

This paragraph also displays an ambivalence at odds with the ad’s claim to uncompromising coverage. Here the ‘circles of power’ are presented as guarantor of Servan-Schreiber’s venture, and yet there is an acknowledgement of and wariness about their interventions. All of this is very telling as to the power dynamics LVE is negotiating in the mid-1990s when economic liberalization led to a rebalancing of power toward the international community and post-Cold War geopolitics increased pressure for democratization. It is also indicative of an approach to dealing with those dynamics that is tied up with transparency and a vision of Morocco open to and in conversation with the world, as a site where the global might be constituted.

The limits of ambivalence

Eight months after Servan-Schreiber announced his project for LVE’s renewal, a controversy erupted when the paper distributed to advertisers a document estimating sales figures and cost-per-thousand impressions for itself and its competitors. Members of the Weekly and Periodical Press Association (AMPHP), protested that the numbers were fabricated, that these were young publications in a small market, that no one had asked LVE to take on the role of circulation monitor. A short news item titled ‘Increase of 2,400 copies sold of La Vie Économique’, reasserts LVE’s position as the ‘first news weekly’ and the newspaper’s commitment to transparency, while challenging competitors by saying ‘We are confident that, soon, we will no longer be the only one in Morocco [to report performance figures]’ (Progression, 1997: 63). ³ Maroc-Hebdo, another weekly, published vitriolic articles accusing Servan-Schreiber of stabbing his colleagues in the back, of Zionist tropism, of believing himself to be the new Resident General of Morocco (Hachmi Idrissi, 1997). Ultimately LVE was suspended from the association (AMPHP), which published a communiqué describing LVE’s actions as ‘untimely, unfriendly and unfair’ (AMPHP, 1997).

The next edition of LVE included another shaded text block under the title ‘To our readers’, which begins ‘In the name of their business interests, several newspapers have embarked on a campaign of violent attacks against La Vie Économique and its director’ (À Nos Lecteurs, 1997: 47). Addressing itself to its readers ‘and only to them’, LVE goes on to describe the contours of the conflict about circulation numbers and offer that its own numbers be verified by a notary. It mentions the attacks above, saying ‘Our readers have seen a series of slanders and slanderous statements, often xenophobic and sometimes racist. But they are better able than anyone to appreciate if the information work of La Vie Économique justifies such hatred’ (À Nos Lecteurs, 1997: 47). The text is undersigned by 64 journalists, columnists, managers, technicians and employees of LVE, including Ali Amar, Ahmed Benchemsi and Aboubakr Jamaï. To the right side there is another small news item announcing that LVE decided not to join AMPHP on January 10, due to ‘defamatory articles’ published in Maroc-Hebdo and La Nouvelle Tribune.

Regardless of whose version of events is more precise, it is clear that Servan-Schreiber, in taking LVE in a more generalist direction through market orientation and competition, butted up against colonial legacies, international geopolitics, and national industry norms. Less than 2 months after this contestation another announcement about Servan-Schreiber appeared in the Echos section. ‘Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber acquires the French monthly “Psychologies”’ declared the headline, with the short news item going on to describe Psychologies as ‘a magazine aimed at the general public’ with a circulation of ‘93,000 copies (controlled by the OJD)’ (Psychologies, 1997: 63). Read in light of the controversy above, the announcement appears to be a snub in the face of quibbles over circulations of 13,000 to 20,000 copies and a system lacking an independent agency responsible for verifying circulation figures. In French newspapers Le Monde and Liberation, Servan-Schreiber’s purchase of Psychologies was described as an ‘entrepreneurial project’ meant to capitalize on ‘the psychology craze’ by blending understanding of the human condition with news (Bozonnet, 1997; Jean-Louis, 1997). A later article in Le Monde reporting on Servan-Schreiber’s success with Psychologies also mentions how he ‘sparked a polemic [in Morocco] by publishing the circulation figures of his competitors’ (Salles, 1999).

In May 1997 the polemic ended with news of LVE’s sale (Nouvel, 1997) and then a full-page editorial from Servan-Schreiber in the next week’s edition under the title ‘Dear Readers’ (Servan-Schreiber, 1997). In the editorial Servan-Schreiber addresses why he chose to sell LVE to a press consortium close to the palace and his experience at the paper. Perhaps most telling is the subheading ‘Taboos and sacred cows’, under which Servan-Schreiber describes difficulties that came from his naiveté of limitations:

‘With a team infatuated with improvements, upstanding and often talented, I have experienced moments that were exciting, and, it appears, sometimes a little dangerous. But protected, perhaps, by my own innocence with regard to certain taboos and sacred cows, we made it through’ (Servan-Schreiber, 1997: 5).

Operating out of context and amidst shifting capital logics, Servan-Schreiber and his young employees in particular pushed at the boundaries of the sacred guided by a market-driven attitude toward innovation. Again, the visuals are telling because the imagery of the ad campaign launched with such fanfare a year earlier features front and center in the editorial. The same cat stares out from the top of the page with the white text ‘At La Vie Économique, we call this animal a cat’ against a black background underneath, effectively suggesting the editorial is a memorial for that direct and daring project.

‘The children of Jean-Louis’

LVE under Servan-Schreiber is remarkable because it signals a different orientation toward capital and the state as facilitator of that capital, paving the way for a new generation of commercial independent media. With LVE, Servan-Schreiber created a market for something that people – albeit elites – actually read. In many ways it provided a model of what was possible amidst changing configurations of power, but also the pitfalls of this approach for a new generation of the independent press.

Ahmed Benchemsi, who has been called the ‘spiritual son’ of Servan-Schreiber (Etchegaray, 2007), came to work for LVE in 1995 with a degree in economics and out of a first job in advertising. At a moment when a civil society was emerging in the form of discussion groups, Benchemsi met LVE’s editor-in-chief Jamal Berraoui at one of these groups. After expressing interest in the paper, Berraoui invited him to the office, where he met Servan-Schreiber and was hired on the spot. ‘I was an avid reader of La Vie éco’ said Benchemsi, ‘at the time it was something really different, basically the only newspaper that was relatively free in its criticism of the government and its possibilities’ (Benchemsi, 2018, personal communication). As a businessman Servan-Schreiber’s quest for innovation and growth was built on this vanguard position, which was intimately tied to the hiring of Benchemsi and other young professionals with little if any professional experience in journalism. ‘Me and my teenage colleagues’, said Benchemsi laughing, ‘none of us had been to journalism school. We pushed the boundaries because we didn’t know otherwise’ (Benchemsi, 2018, personal communication). According to Benchemsi, when Servan-Schreiber took over LVE he looked around and saw a generation of journalists ossified by propaganda, many of them political activists who had suffered retribution for their activism during the Years of Lead.

Bringing in new blood was made possible by pay rates that were three times what party papers were offering. ‘Journalism became seen as a profession at that time because before journalists would only be hired if they belonged to a party and anyone could write party propaganda, so they were paid nothing, about 2000 dirhams per month on average’ said Benchemsi. This represents a distinct shift in vision of who and what journalism is for, as well as how to orchestrate that vision. An increasingly liberal and entrepreneurial vision of independence as tied to global capital and the commercial potential of media means that the press is understood to be responsive (and responsible to) audiences and markets rather than nationalist political projects, even as these publications take distinct stances on particular issues.

And it is perhaps paradoxically through this approach that politics reenters the Moroccan press. ‘Economics is the trojan horse of the free press in Morocco’ said Benchemsi, ‘at the time there was no way to talk about politics in a meaningful way, but economics offered relatively more freedom. It was very fashionable to be in finance at the time’ (Benchemsi, 2018, personal communication). Amidst a wave of liberalization and privatization, the emergence of the press both as a tool for these projects and a business in and of itself played into the zeitgeist of the globalization moment. At the same time, the relationship of the economy to structures of power and the linking of investor confidence to political stability brought politics back into public discourse. In the Moroccan case, the emergence of the monarchy as a foremost economic as well as political power meant the increasing interpenetration of market and state, which made way for a more liberal generation of the Left to expand the margins of speech. By all measures LVE’s journalists did seem to have wide margins for innovation, specialization and critique. Benchemsi’s work appeared most frequently in the politics and society sections, consisting of political and social commentary as well as on-the-ground reporting. Ali Amar investigated topics mostly related to business and finance, Aboubakr Jamaï analyzed markets, and Ali Lmrabet wrote mostly about issues relating to northern Morocco, the Rif and Spanish foreign policy. Under Servan-Schreiber’s leadership new sections and numerous experiments unfolded across its pages.

However, rapid growth of publications after 1991 tied to the expansion of printing facilities owned by Maroc Soir Group meant that there was increasing competition for Morocco’s small reading public. ‘LVE did so well that at some point it became a problem for authorities’, said Benchemsi, ‘Jean-Louis saw he was under attack from all sides and he was a businessman – he didn’t want to fight the system’ (Benchemsi, 2018, personal communication). LVE’s sale to Caractères ⁴ brought the publication back under makhzen control and few of its pioneering young journalists stayed long. Jamaï and Amar left to start Le Journal just before the November 1997 elections, Lmrabet worked for Le Journal before starting Demain, and Benchemsi left for graduate school then jobs at Le Journal and Jeune Afrique before starting TelQuel. These publications contributed to an unprecedented era of media dynamism in Morocco that expanded upon a trajectory established under Servan-Schreiber at LVE and ushered in an era of often contentious negotiation between media, markets, and the state. Rooted in global capital and financial journalism, this project is perhaps best characterized by an experimental attitude summarized in Servan-Schreiber’s farewell column in LVE. He begins by quoting King Hassan II that ‘There are not savage populations and intelligent populations, but conformist populations and adventurous populations. Only the latter will win’. He goes on to add ‘This observation applies particularly well to the press. That La Vie Économique remains “adventurous”’ (Servan-Schreiber, 1997: 5).

As seen in the introduction, Servan-Schreiber also had a more direct influence on the next generation of media ownerships through his investment in TelQuel. The listing of Perla Danan as an investor is remarkably transparent, as it would not be difficult to deduce the connection of Benchemsi’s former employer to the project. Yet the structure of TelQuel’s quasi-legal financing did not seem to come into question, again demonstrating an ambivalence toward independent media, and an openness to its possibilities. Additionally, Servan-Schreiber’s influence on TelQuel went beyond investment into the realm of content. More focused on society and culture than the other independent publications of its era, TelQuel nevertheless included a prominent business section, which Benchemsi attributes to Servan-Schreiber. ‘We had a business page because we had to, to bring in advertisers’, he said, ‘Actually I neglected the business page for years until Jean-Louis insisted’ (Benchemsi, 2018, personal communication). Additionally, Perla Danan was far from a legal placeholder, instead ‘she was an active participant in Presse Directe’s board, and helped a lot with our advertisement sales strategy’ (Benchemsi, 2020, personal communication). It was a strong multinational advertising base that eventually allowed TelQuel to withstand advertising boycotts led by the royal holding company that damaged its domestic advertising base and led to the demise of Telquel’s Moroccan Arabic sister publication Nichane.

Economic censorship reached its culmination in the lead-up to the 2011 Arab Spring protests with TelQuel naming 2009 as ‘the year where defamation cases have been used to punish newspapers’, and 2010 seeing the demise of Le Journal and Nichane (Journalistes taisez-vous!, 2009). The experience of economic censorship meant that many new media coming out of that moment were activist projects orchestrated online with little capital and often in conjunction with civil society organizations. Out of these, Ali Amar and Fatima-Zahra Lqadiri’s Le Desk emerged as a pioneering project attempting to forgo advertising for a subscription model. Proposing a response to concerns about transparency and rigor among digital sites, Le Desk received support from the EU’s Ebticar-Media development program aimed at supporting innovative online content while increasing pluralism and reliability (Ebticar Media, 2015). Relying on Morocco’s relative strength in internet penetration, the initial vision for Le Desk involved bypassing highly concentrated media ownership and advertising markets in favor of journalist control and reader support. Le Desk’s initial budget was ~500,000 euros, primarily from personal investments by Amar, Lqadiri and sleeping partner Aziz Aouadi, with a third of the site’s capital reserved for the site’s journalists as shareholders (Bousquet, 2015). ⁵ This participative approach to ownership was meant to support an emphasis on breaking news and investigative reporting lacking in an often opinion-based and sensationalist online space, complemented by interactive digital design and data visualization (Qui sommes nous?, 2018). In many ways, Le Desk’s start-up style venture and essentially crowd-funded model can be traced back to a moment when global capital and financial journalism offered an entry point to independence, and the subsequent use of those mechanisms for control by the state.

Conclusion

The emergence of this market orientation offered greater margins for negotiation, but also new mechanisms for control. In no way do I want to suggest that markets are the solution to state overreach. In fact, one of the key points here is that they are increasingly inseparable. The transformation of the state into a facilitator for capital and the monarchy’s influence in private markets means that market mechanisms facilitate new forms of management and control. The new generation of independent media started by Servan-Schreiber’s former employees evolved in the context of expanding economic censorship whereby investors (or lack thereof), advertising boycotts, tax penalties, judicial harassment and fines were used to sanction press coverage seen as crossing a line by the palace even as the independent press was broadly celebrated as a harbinger of democracy. These tactics continue today and are not unique to Morocco, having been discussed in relation to Turkey, Egypt, and any other number of authoritarian contexts. However, Morocco does offer a site for considering the coexistence of relatively wide margins for critique with the consolidation of authoritarian state power. The rise of an ambivalent authoritarianism in media-state relations is not followed by substantive progress on power sharing, but rather the increasing consolidation of political power in an era of unprecedented media opening.

This shift in media-state relations is tied to the professionalization of politics and the rise of public relations, but it goes beyond that. Ambivalent authoritarianism attempts to account for the diversity of coopting and coercive mechanisms employed by state authorities to ‘manage’ media in an era of neoliberal globalization. It challenges assumptions about media’s relationship to democratization and considers its role in the authoritarian transformation. It also moves beyond the preoccupation with democratic transition and institutional politics more broadly to think about new arenas of socio-cultural and political interaction. In an era of increasing interconnectedness, media becomes a domain where politics is enacted and that is particularly significant for externally-oriented economies and small market states like Morocco. Ultimately, market logics permeated LVE under Servan-Schreiber, whose business-oriented approach to the press led him to hire a group of young journalists trained in economics and finance and adopt an experimental approach to growth. All this positioned LVE not as a militant opposition paper, but also one that did not eschew critique, adding to the image of regime liberalization. This formative moment gave birth to a new generation of media owners and publications attempting to work within the constraints of capital, negotiating between working in conjunction with and in opposition to the state’s new politics of appearances. The reentry of politics into public discourse through a neoliberal frame coincides with the emergence of a media-state relationship rooted in ambivalence, wherein media ownership and financing increasingly intersect with global capital flows, geopolitical priorities, nationalist politics, transnational cultural elites, and local cultural politics.