Fear of Fox News-style ‘American turn’ shakes the French press – 06/28/2023 – Market

Fears of a Fox News-style “American turn” rose in the French press after tycoon Vincent Bolloré, known for his very conservative views, added a major newspaper to his growing media group.

On June 9, the European Commission validated the acquisition by Vincent Bolloré of the Journal du Dimanche (JDD), a Sunday press institution with 140,000 copies sold each week, as well as Paris Match magazine and Europe 1 radio, which raises fears about the plurality of media.

The decision to put Geoffroy Lejeune in charge of the editorial office of the JDD, a controversial journalist who until recently ran the ultraconservative weekly Valeurs Actuelles, triggered the alerts and provoked a strike by journalists, who decided to extend the stoppage this Wednesday (28).

With Lejeune as editor-in-chief, the magazine published a caricature in 2020 of black leftist congresswoman Danièle Obono as enslaved, which resulted in a conviction for public slander of a racial nature. In May, one of its last covers carried the headline: “Save 50-Year-Old Straight White Men.”

“The JDD newsroom rejects that a man, whose ideas are in total contradiction with the newspaper’s values, directs it,” said the newsroom’s journalists’ commission, which has the support of unions and the left-wing opposition.

Even the government of centrist President Emmanuel Macron has expressed concern, through Culture Minister Rima Abdul-Malak, who said she “understands the concerns”. “How not to be worried?”, she questioned her.

Bolloré, 71 years old, is a billionaire close to traditional Catholicism and, although he has always denied using his media outlets to publicize his opinions, he left a bitter memory in all the newsrooms he went through.

When his Vivendi group bought Canal+ in 2015, the iTélé information channel experienced a 31-day strike the following year against inflexible directors. Most journalists left the network, the network was renamed CNews, and its editorial line shifted to the right.

During the last presidential campaign, candidate Éric Zemmour, a former employee of the network, appeared daily on the channel.

“CNews rhymes with Fox News”

“CNews rhymes with Fox News,” Christophe Deloire, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told AFP, for whom “in the end it is no longer known whether the stations are newsrooms or political parties.”

For Deloire, “we are seeing an American shift (…) in which there is a risk of polarization and which causes vehicles to end up immersed in ideological wars instead of seeking reality”. “This is not a democratic model,” she added.

France is following in the footsteps of countries where powerful businessmen own controversial media outlets, such as the Australian Rupert Murdoch, owner of the British tabloid The Sun and the American Fox News network, according to Arnaud Mercier, professor of Communication at the French Press Institute .

Bolloré’s strategy, according to Mercier, consists of “appropriating an existing vehicle, emptying it of part of its outdated liberal tone, to replace it with conservative and reactionary editorial lines”, in the name of a “war culture” against the liberal “dominant ideology”.

The extreme right has been theorizing for years the conquest of “cultural hegemony”, according to the formula of the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), which must precede the seizure of power at the ballot box.

French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who lost to Macron in the second round of the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections, on Tuesday criticized the “hypocrisy” of the left and the country’s ruling party, as she considered the treatment of the newspaper JDD to his party as insufficient and subjective