Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel

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The Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel (CSA) is a French institution whose role is to regulate the various electronic media in France, such as radio and television, including through eventual censorship. For example, it was the CSA that asked the French government to forbid Al-Manar TV in 2005 because of charges of hate speech.

Created by a 1989 law, the CSA is the French equivalent of the American FCC, and considered to be an inheritance of the state control of television by the Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française (ORTF) under Charles de Gaulle's presidency. The CSA replaced the Commission Nationale de la Communication et des Libertés (CNCL), which itself replaced the Haute Autorité de la Communication Audiovisuelle, created in 1982 to supervise the attribution of radio frequencies to the private radio sector, which was judged better than allowing the anarchic creation of the radio libres ("free radios"), mainly composed of amateurs and NGOs.