Trip to La MAP, 2M and SIGMA

The AUI communication club organized a trip to visit  La MAP, 2M and SIGMA to give to students the chance to discover the professional world in the communication and media domain.

La MAP is a private institution established in 1959 and founded by Mehdi Bennouna. At this time the idea of establishing a well know organization and financing publicities was futuristic, but after that it was nationalized because of financial issues. When becoming a state enterprise in 1974 the objectives of la MAP became remarkable and tangible. Nowadays, la MAP has its own budget provided by the state each year. This highlights the involvement of the state in the media sectors and its awareness about the importance of communications in people’s daily life. La MAP functions both at the national and the international level. At the international level, it has many international offices that communicate in four languages, Arabic, French, English Spanish Chinese and Japanese. Those offices are in Paris, Abidjan, Dakar, Lisbon, Washington, Algeria, and so on. The international offices help vehicle news regarding Morocco to the outside. It has also an agreement with more than 50 agencies around the world, for instance, AP, UPR, Reuters and also France news agency. They are not limited to specific subjects; they treat different topics like politics, society, sport, immigration, relation-ship between European Union and many other focuses that may trigger the interest of different readers. At the national Level, they send news to different headquarters and broadcast news from Rabat and they have reporters in all the Moroccan regions. They always seek new material and report facts with making sure of not giving any judgment that may influence the readers and making them believe a certain judgment or a point of view about a specific piece of information. They report facts as they are, and leave the free ground to their news buyers for making their own judgments. They have twenty two offices abroad correspondence and broadcast more than two hundred news each day in Arabic and then translate them to French.

La MAP has five departments, which are the transaction department, computer department, commercial department, external relation and administrative department. The most important one is the news department or the transaction department. This department is responsible for reporting news to the other allied agencies. In this department, journalists and reporters have a meeting every Friday about all the news that were covered throughout the week, and the important news that should be covered in the near future. The news department is divided into 4 desks: political, economic, general and international.

According to a journalist who works in la MAP named Abdulah M’Channa, the organization suffers from the notion of censorship. Meaning that sometimes journalists know the impact of the news on the readers and feel that many people can interpret it in a way that they way they would not like them to do. They do their best to try to move away sources of trouble if not sure about the facts, dates or places. It may take them too much time working on a single news topic before releasing it and they have to be very careful when talking about monarchy, as it is a very delicate topic that may lead to serious problems if it is not treated the way the state and the government inflict. In addition, they have to be careful about some political issues like the problem of Sahara. Most of the time, they record interviews or obtain written papers from interviewees for credibility reasons.  

The Director General of la MAP is appointed by the king. In his turn, the director general can appoint five directors in each department which is the case for all senior departments. The actual Director is Mohammed Khabbachi that holds the post since 2003.