Abstract
In 1986, in France, the introduction of commercial logic by competition of private and public channels made of television an object of recurrent debate relative to its influence in cultural terms. By reference to the triptych of public sector ("to inform, distract and educate"), it is the authority of regulation 1 which defines for the private channels the general rules of programming. Thus, private sector is not distinguished basically from public one. The existence of an audiovisual public sector is legitimated by reference to quality, public channels having to play a driving role. But does the quality define by the regulator differ between public and private televisions? Through legislative texts, the purpose of this article is firstly to provide information on the qualitative aspects of televisual programming that the regulator wished, and secondly to show the existence or not of a differentiation between public and private sector. For that, we use a Textual Statistics of licence conditions of hertzian general practitioner channels.