Of all the reforms launched by President Nicolas Sarkozy in his first year in office, few have provoked as much sound and fury as his proposal to ban advertising from France's public broadcasting sector. Yet given all the other deep-rooted economic, social and structural problems facing the country, reforming a perfectly functional state broadcasting system hardly qualifies as a priority.

Even senior government officials are admitting in private that the issue has become a real distraction - all the more so now that France has assumed the presidency of the European Union and is having to tackle Europe's biggest problems at least for the next six months.