The Rise of CNews
APRIL 25, 2024
The Reporter’s Notebook is our monthly interview series with Dial contributors. To receive these conversations directly in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter.
✺
A conversation with Christopher Clark, whose article on the French far-right media outlet was published in our Pundits issue.
Photo by Gigi Graff
France's far-right media empire is growing. For our Pundits issue, Christopher Clark reported on the rise of CNews, a free 24-hour news channel owned by the conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré, whose coverage of crime, immigration, and identity politics is commanding national debate. "Since its launch in early 2017, it has helped the channel gain a reputation as France’s answer to Fox News. It is a simple recipe that has seen CNews’s audience share more than triple since its debut. Today, it boasts more than eight million daily viewers," Clark writes. Dial intern Liana Raguso spoke with Clark about CNews's increasing political influence, how Bolloré is shaping the media industry, and more.
THE DIAL: How did you first become interested in writing about CNews?
CHRISTOPHER CLARK: I live in France, and I have for a few years. CNews had been something in the background that I’d had a vague sense of for some time—this somewhat anecdotal and unquantified sense that it was becoming more present. Then the killing of Thomas Perotto, a teenager in the village of Crépol happened, and I felt that that shone a light on a lot of different issues in France at the moment. In particular, it highlighted the mounting tensions around race, immigration and notions of French identity and the increasing power of the far-right to dictate the debate around these issues. So, my interest in reporting on the news channel really spilled out of that particular incident.
THE DIAL: How have you seen CNews’s increasing political influence play out in everyday life over the last few years? Have you noticed any shifts in how people talk about CNews, or how much?
CC: It’s not just CNews. Many of my sources referred to a broader “ideological project” to amplify hot button issues on the right and influence the currents of public discourse. And it’s working: the ideas presented on CNews and other media owned by Vincent Bolloré are seeping more and more into the mainstream. I don’t necessarily hear people specifically referring to CNews, but they refer to ideas and reporting first published on CNews and then popularized.
One of the environments where I notice this is in my rugby club in a neighboring village. Most of the guys that play are local, some have never left that area, and most work in farming or trades like construction or plumbing—working-class jobs ultimately. They’re largely 40-years-old and above. This is the prime CNews audience—men in the provinces over 40. Often they’ll ask me, “Oh, you didn’t see that story?” and I’ll be like, “No, I didn’t see that story,” and then I’ll go and look at CNews, and be like, “Ah, okay, that’s where they got that story from.”
As I say in the piece, the negative framing of stories relating to things like immigration and Islam is also y filtering into other media owned by Bolloré, as well as other outlets including the newspaper Le Figaro and the 24-hour news channel BFMTV, who are increasingly accommodating to far-right ideas. In the case of the latter, to a degree they are trying to replicate CNews because of its audience growth. So, it’s not surprising that over the last few years the things that are being spoken about or featured heavily on CNews, such as violent crimes committed by immigrants, are more and more a part of daily conversation in a region where—outside of my village—people have increasingly tended to vote on the right in recent elections.
THE DIAL: How do you think Vincent Bolloré's stamp on French media is changing the industry? How have you seen journalists respond to the changing media landscape?
CC: Part of what CNews does is position itself as the only channel that’s telling the truth, and everyone else is lying, and all the other journalists are lying. But it also positions itself as the underdog. I’ve watched videos of journalists on CNews, and often they can’t help but take the bait and argue according to the rules that CNews sets. Unfortunately, and somewhat inevitably, people get dragged into the fight in trying to defend themselves against some of the things that CNews is saying about other media outlets and journalists and so on.
There is also a growing fixation on and coverage of Bolloré and his media, not just CNews, because again, I think many journalists see it as a serious threat. There has been a lot of excellent reporting done in French media around Bolloré’s increasing grasp of the media industry, where there have also been a lot of financial issues and layoffs. But part of the reason I wanted to do this article is because I felt that it hadn’t really been picked up that much outside of France. I think there’s a lot that can be learned and a lot of warning signs, things to be paid attention to in countries all over the world.
More and more of the conversation among journalists here is around what adjustments should be made to the legal framework to ensure more financial transparency, to have more protection against editorial lines put in place by shareholders like Bolloré, how to better protect journalists and give them more say over what is published and what isn’t, over who is employed and who isn’t. There’s been an increasing emphasis on what practical, legal steps can be taken, such as guaranteeing journalists’ right to vote on proposed editorial directors. While some papers, including Le Monde, already do this, it is not currently a legal obligation. Several journalism advocacy groups are pushing for this to be changed.
THE DIAL: You write that the village where you live, Lagrasse, became “a battleground in a right-wing religious crusade” after a group of conservative writers wrote a book about their experience living in the town’s abbey. Can you describe how people living in Lagrasse have responded to this book and the attention it garnered?
CC: The village is a bit of a progressive bubble with left-wing roots that stem back to the late ’60s. People involved in the student movement in Paris at the time moved to this area. Some of these people, who were from a radical left-wing strand of Catholicism, ended up living in one side of the abbey, which at that time was effectively abandoned. They mostly had quite socialist principles, and built a self-sufficient community: they would grow their own food, sell artifacts, woodwork or vegetables – that kind of thing. Then at some point they had to leave the abbey because the part that they were living in was bought by a German investor, who eventually sold it back to a religious group. Monks, who had been there for centuries previously, moved back in in 2004. There is a persisting feeling among the left-wing contingent that the monks are effectively newcomers, and that they’re trying to impose a new conservative ethos in the village.
The other side of the abbey, which belongs to the local government, houses a literary association that also has strong left-wing origins. They have had a somewhat uneasy relationship for many years with the traditionalist religious order living next door.
More recently, a lot of the property in the village is being bought by people with strong links to the religious part of the abbey. There is a very real and ever-present sense of the threat this poses to the village’s liberal values with regards to things like immigration and the LGBT community.
I think people have a sense that all of this is a microcosm of national issues; across the country people like Vincent Bolloré are pushing a very clear right-wing ideological agenda, and with a very clear religious element. It’s linked to this idea of French tradition. There’s a considerable number of people in France above the age of 50 who are Catholic, but if you look at French people under 30, there’s a tiny percentage that still identify as Catholic. Harking back to a more Catholic France is a way for the right to counter what that they feel is a threat to traditional French identity.
THE DIAL: Now that Bolloré's sons have taken over his media empire, how do you see them shaping the future of CNews?
CC: The channel’s numbers are growing consistently. Other channels, other competitors are struggling, so there’s nothing to suggest at this point that his sons are going to really change anything much in any significant way. They are younger, they’re of a different generation, they’re probably slightly more dynamic and maybe slightly more aware of certain contemporary trends, so there may be small tweaks here and there to adapt to that. I think it remains to be seen at this point if the mounting number of legal decisions and challenges and so on that CNews and other Bolloré media assets are facing will necessitate some kind of change. At the moment, there’s nothing to suggest that it will. If it’s working, then as long as it’s working, and as long as they’re not facing, say, massive fines that are so big that they wouldn’t be able to operate, then I think they’ll just keep doing what they’re doing. If anything, some of these legal challenges and so on have just given them more fuel to say, "Everyone’s out to get us because we’re doing so well and they’re jealous, we’re being censored, we’re trying to tell people the truth." It’s just given them another drum to beat.
✺ Read “Bad News” in “Issue 15: Pundits”
CHRISTOPHER CLARK is a freelance journalist currently based in the south of France. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Harper's, the Washington Post and others. His first book, Clare: The Killing of a Gentle Activist, was published by Tafelberg in 2022.
LIANA RAGUSO is an editor living in Chicago, where she has edited for The Point and Euphony. She studies English Literature at the University of Chicago.