Do Not Appoint a Director General of National Radio and Television of Haiti. (Open letter to the new Minister of Culture and Communication, Emmanuel Ménard.) By Jean Venel Casséus

National Radio and Television have long ceased to be the exclusive heart of public communication. The media landscape has fragmented, digitized, and disintermediated. Digital platforms, streaming, social media, mobile content production, editorial artificial intelligence, real-time interaction with citizens: the modern state no longer communicates through a single channel, but through an integrated system of public media.

Instead of a Director General of National Radio and Television (DGRTNH), the position would benefit from evolving towards that of Director General of State Media (DGME). The difference is not a matter of administrative vocabulary. It concerns how the State now conceives its presence in the informational space.

The designation « National Radio and Television » refers to a historical configuration: that of a State addressing the country through two central broadcasters, in a relatively stable and less competitive media landscape. This architecture corresponded to an era when radio structured the public sphere and television represented the main audiovisual vector for national dissemination.

This landscape no longer exists. Information now circulates in a hybrid environment where the boundaries between production, dissemination, and reception are blurred. Content migrates from one medium to another, formats are constantly reconfigured, and audiences navigate between radio, television, digital platforms, mobile phones, and social networks. In this shifting ecosystem, limiting public action to the management of two historical broadcasters confines the State to a reductive representation of its own communication.

Speaking of State media allows for embracing this new reality. National radio and national television retain their place within it, but as components of a broader whole: public digital platforms, online broadcasting services, cultural and educational productions, audiovisual archives, digital information devices, and future media yet to come. The challenge is no longer to administer stations, but to structure a public media system capable of accompanying the transformations of the informational space.

This evolution also has an institutional scope. State media fall under the continuity of the Republic. Their vocation is to inform, document national life, transmit collective memory, and offer a space for expression to the country's social and cultural pluralism. They belong to the State, not to successive governments.

It is precisely this distinction that forms their credibility. A governmental medium speaks on behalf of a power, a State medium speaks on behalf of the nation. It embeds public action in the long term, beyond alternations and circumstances.

Appointing a Director General of State Media means preparing the institution to evolve with technologies, with uses, and with new forms of information circulation. In other words, it is to enable the Haitian State to think of its media no longer as an administrative legacy, but as a strategic infrastructure of contemporary democratic life.