The rise of CNews and the making of France’s far-right media empire.

APRIL 25, 2024

A shabby community hall in Crépol, a small village in France’s south-eastern Drôme region, was the unlikely source of the frenzy. In the early hours of November 19 2023, 16-year-old Thomas Perotto, the son of a local restaurateurs and a keen rugby player, was fatally stabbed after a fight broke out at Crépol’s annual winter dance. Some village locals accused a group of outsiders from Romans-sur-Isère, a working-class town about 10 miles south of Crépol with many inhabitants of North African descent.

Before the day was out, a number of far-right groups, political figures and right-wing media had seized on the story, elevating what might have otherwise remained a local tragedy to a national crisis. Networks and politicians framed the killing as an anti-white hate crime, the latest chapter in an irreconcilable clash of civilizations between “two Frances.” Any apparent evidence to the contrary, including preliminary details from the police investigation, was dismissed by commentators as an attempt to conceal the uncomfortable truth. The furor culminated on November 25, when around 100 ultraright nationalists descended on Romans-sur-Isère wrapped in Tricolor flags and armed with baseball bats and metal pipes. Around 20 people were arrested after violent clashes with riot police. Olivier Veran, spokesperson for President Emmanuel Macron's centrist government, was dispatched to Crépol in a bid to diffuse tensions, from where he issued a statement warning that French society was "at risk of tipping-over.”

This kind of incendiary commentary at the nexus of crime, immigration and identity politics is CNews’s bread and butter.

Nowhere was the unfolding drama given more attention than on CNews, a free 24-hour news channel owned by the conservative billionaire industrialist Vincent Bolloré, which broadcast hour after hour of breathless coverage and righteous indignation about the killing and its aftermath. On November 20 with the details still sketchy at best, far-right commentator Mathieu Bock-Côté, a regular CNews fixture, claimed there was a clear “dimension of conquest” to the incident. A few days later, CNews’s star journalist Pascal Praud choked back tears as he commented live on Perotto’s funeral: “What to say? What to say but pray?” he said. Laurence Ferrari, who hosts a popular political talk-show on the channel, evoked a “whiff of civil war in the air.” Alarmist banners ran across the bottom of the screen repeatedly deploying the term “ensauvagement,” a well-worn far-right dog whistle.

This kind of incendiary commentary at the nexus of crime, immigration and identity politics is CNews’s bread and butter. 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, according to Mediametrie, a company that compiles French television ratings; its audience is predominantly male and over-60. At the beginning of December 2023, just two weeks after the Crépol killing, for the first time in its short history, CNews became the most-watched news channel over the course of an entire week. It repeated the feat in mid-February this year during the country’s farmers’ protests. These numbers highlight the channel’s increasing power to direct the currents of national debate; it was recently reported that Macron and some of his closest advisors are now regular viewers, as they seek to keep up with hot button issues on the right.

Aside from the Crépol killing, the channel’s recently strong performance comes from its coverage of the Israel Hamas war, according to Puremédias, a news site that monitors the French media and communications market. CNews has overwhelmingly adopted a decidedly pro-Israel stance. Throughout much of November, the channel also provided round-the-clock coverage of a controversial new bill that sought to tighten residency and social welfare rules for immigrants. It was ultimately adopted by France’s parliament on December 19.

“CNews thrives on topics that are highly divisive,” Alexandra Colineau, an editor and spokesperson for Un Bout des Médias, an advocacy group that seeks to promote media independence, told me. “When you have a local crime like Crépol that you can also politically hijack in the context of a new immigration law that’s about to be passed, then that is really their ideal combo.”

Company executives, as well as Vincent Bolloré himself, have routinely downplayed both CNews’ ability to influence public discourse and any insinuation that it is pushing a far-right ideological agenda. “We are not populists, but we are popular, and obviously that makes everyone angry,” Gérald-Brice Viret, managing director of the Canal+ group, which was taken over by Bolloré in 2014 and owns CNews, told the Financial Times in 2021. In testimony before a Senate commission on the concentration of media ownership in France in January 2022, Bolloré argued that his media conglomerate was “a dwarf” compared to companies like Apple, Sony, and Disney.

Serge Nedjar, managing director of CNews, has cited a poll that the Institute of Consumer Science and Analytics (CSA), incidentally another Bolloré-owned company, conducted for the channel. It found that 27 percent of viewers identified with the left, nine percent with the center and 24 percent with the right. A total of 40 percent of viewers either did not identify with a party or did not say. “That is the figure we give to show we are absolutely not a far-right channel,” Nedjar told The Guardian in 2021. (Nedjar and Viret did not respond to requests for comment on this story, while Bolloré declined an interview request through a press representative).

Yet despite such claims, the channel has a conspicuously cozy relationship with Eric Zemmour, a reactionary polemicist who has become France’s most famous far-right ideologue. Zemmour’s criminal convictions for racial and religious hate speech include a 2011 ruling following a comment that “most drug dealers are black and Arab” and another in 2019 for comments about a Muslim “invasion.” But that did not stop CNews from hiring Zemmour as a special contributor on its nightly debate show, “Facing the News”, later that same year. In March 2021, France’s media regulator fined CNews €200,000 for broadcasting Zemmour’s castigation of unaccompanied immigrant minors. “They are thieves, they are murderers, they are rapists, that’s all they are. They must be sent back,” he said.

In the weeks following the 2021 controversy, viewing figures for “Facing the News” as well as the channel’s other weekday shows, continued to climb. Then, in September, CNews was forced to temporarily remove Zemmour as a pundit. Amid mounting speculation that he was going to run for president in the 2022 general elections, French media regulators had decided to class Zemmour as a politician rather than a journalist, imposing legal restrictions on his airtime.

Zemmour’s bid ultimately ended in resounding defeat: he gathered a meagre 7.1 percent of votes cast in the election’s first round. But with the help of CNews, even before his name was on the ballot, he had succeeded in pulling previously fringe far-right talking points, including the Great Replacement theory, which posits that ethnic European populations are being usurped by non-white immigrants, firmly into the mainstream.

The sheer outrageousness of some of Zemmour’s proposals, including a Trump-style wall and a “zero immigration” policy, also had a normalizing effect on Marine Le Pen. Although she ultimately lost to the incumbent Emmanuel Macron in a second-round run-off, her Rassemblement National (RN) took more than 40 percent of the vote. The party obtained 88 seats in parliamentary elections in the National Assembly a month later. The party is now poised for a similar performance in the upcoming European Parliament election, with polls putting it around 13 percentage points ahead of the centrist Ensemble! coalition, which includes Macron’s Renaissance party.

“In 2021, before the election, it was already clear that with CNews, Bolloré was pushing a bid to furnish the far-right a space for expression in the mainstream, which was something it had not previously had,” Virginie Martin, a professor of political sciences and sociology at Kedge Business School in Paris, told me. “Now, we can really say that his bet paid off. They are there. And they are certainly very visible.”

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The cameras started rolling at 7pm on January 31, 2005. As the television station Direct 8 went on air for the first time, Vincent Bolloré, in a crisp blue suit with his greying hair parted to the side, chose to personally announce his arrival on the French media scene. “It’s been 20 years since there’s been a new free channel in France,” he said to the camera. “Live TV, it’s the truth of life,” enthused his co-host, renowned author and journalist Philippe Labro, who Bolloré had enlisted to run Direct 8.

“Bolloré has built a media empire unlike any other in French history.”

Although Bolloré was not yet a household name, he had already amassed a large fortune through an array of industrial ventures. Born into a traditionalist Catholic family in Brittany in 1952, in 1981 he’d taken over a near-bankrupt family paper business from his father and diversified its activities into logistics, maritime freight, advertising, energy, transport and agriculture. Under his leadership, the Bolloré group expanded into 100 countries, with a particularly strong presence in Africa, where its business dealings have been dogged by ongoing legal proceedings for alleged corruption, as well as alleged human rights and environmental offences. In February 2021, the group was fined around $13 million after Bolloré and two other senior company executives admitted responsibility on charges of active corruption of public officials and complicity in breach of trust in Guinea and Togo.

When Direct 8 took to the airwaves, Bolloré’s net worth was $2.2 billion according to a Forbes list of billionaires for 2005. Today, the total worth of the man and his family has grown to $9.5 billion. But while Bolloré’s former African logistic business (which was entirely sold in 2022) has historically accounted for the lion’s share of his profits, it is his increasing omnipresence in the media and communications industry that has drawn the most attention. By 2007, Bolloré had added two free daily newspapers and one of the world’s largest global communications groups, Havas, to his growing stable. In 2012, Bolloré became one of the largest shareholders of the mass-media company Vivendi, opening the door for him to take over in June 2014. A year later, he was installed as chairman of Canal+, which is owned by the company. Vivendi has since taken control of the magazine company Prisma Media, the radio station Europe 1, and the leading print weeklies Paris Match and the Journal du Dimanche. It also owns one of France’s largest publishing companies, Hachette, and, until 2021, was a majority shareholder in the Universal Music Group. “Bolloré has built a media empire unlike any other in French history,” media historian Alexis Lévrier told me. “It’s completely unprecedented.”

According to Colineau, France’s particular legal framework has facilitated both Bolloré’s increasing hold on the media landscape and the furthering of his “ideological project.” Among other things, Colineau highlighted the current framework’s shortcomings with regards to ensuring financial transparency, as well as the fact that major shareholders can impose their choice of editor. “To a certain extent, this is not just about Bolloré, because most of the media in France is owned by six billionaires,” Colineau added. “But more than anyone else, Bolloré clearly displays his ideology, his political support, and the fact that he censors the media he owns. This is where it starts to get dangerous.”

On a grey morning in late 2016 in a large office block on the banks of the Seine, scores of journalists cleared the contents of their desks into cardboard boxes, and announced their departures, sharing a few final words and embraces in a steady, somber procession. The newsroom of I-Télé, which positioned itself as a kind of CNN à la française, was in the middle of a historic strike against Bolloré, who, through Vivendi, took charge of the channel’s parent group Canal + in 2015. After months of mounting concerns about editorial independence, the final straw had been the controversial hiring of Jean-Marc Morandini, a friend of Bolloré’s, to present a new show while he was still under investigation for sexual harassment and corruption of minors. (Morandini received a six-month suspended sentence for the former and a one-year suspended sentence for the latter, though he has appealed both).

Around 100 of the 120 journalists employed at I-Télé would ultimately leave the channel. A few months later, CNews rose from I-Télé’s ashes.

This radical reset has served as a blueprint for some of Vivendi’s subsequent takeovers, most recently that of the Journal de Dimanche, a renowned centrist institution. In June 2023, the staff of the paper staged a mass walk-out after the shock appointment of Geoffroy Lejeune as editor in chief. Lejeune was the former editor of Valeurs Actuelles, a far-right magazine fined for publishing racist insults. He is also a regular guest on CNews.

Bolloré’s ever-expanding media interests have predictably prompted comparisons with the paradigmatic press baron Rupert Murdoch.

The strike held for forty days. Ultimately, Bolloré won out again. Lejeune stayed and the newsroom was gutted. The first issue under Lejeune’s editorship led with a story about the death of 15-year-old Enzo Péridy, framed in much the same way as the Crépol killing would be a little over three months later. New staff hires at the paper included three former journalists from RT France, the local arm of Russia’s state broadcaster.

A similar scenario has played out elsewhere: At the end of February this year, the daily Le Parisien and Agence France-Presse (AFP) published an article in which sources inside Fayard, a publishing house acquired by the billionaire, denounced Bolloré’s “ideological project” after learning of Vivendi’s intention to install Zemmour’s editor, Lise Böell, as general director of the publishing house. (She eventually moved to a different publishing house in the same group.) “At a time when questions are being asked about diversity within Vincent Bolloré's media,” one source told AFP. “Everyone at Fayard understands very well that there could be a CNews-style publishing house.”

Bolloré’s ever-expanding media interests have predictably prompted comparisons with the paradigmatic press baron Rupert Murdoch. “Like Murdoch, Bolloré has been able to build a cross-media empire with synergies between his publishing houses, magazines and newspapers and television channels,” said historian David Colon, a professor at Sciences-Po Paris, who published a recent book about Murdoch.

However, Colon also noted two key differences between the men. First of all, “a certain number of Bolloré’s editorial choices are not very economically smart.” A confidential internal audit obtained by online publication La Lettre in July 2023 showed that almost all of Vivendi’s television assets, including CNews, were millions of Euros in the red. For Bolloré’s critics, these numbers shore up the idea that his mission is primarily ideological.

The second significant variance, Colon told me, is Bolloré’s faith. Bolloré is open about his Catholicism. In a rare media interview with Le Monde in 2013, Bolloré said he attended Mass every week, calling it a “joy.” He reportedly kept an imposing statue of the Virgin Mary in his office. In 2020, CNews began airing a weekly Sunday religious show called “In Search of the Spirit”. On August 15 2021, the channel devoted its entire Sunday broadcast to the Catholic pilgrimage to Lourdes for the feast of the Assumption. Such moves have flown in the face of taboos in a country where religion has long been seen as incompatible with national values.

The tendrils of this religious component of Bolloré’s media empire reach all the way to the medieval village of Lagrasse deep in rural southern France, where I live. Lagrasse’s striking 8th-century abbey, some its first foundations laid before Charlemagne, has in more recent years been somewhat uneasily divided into two distinct parts, one owned by a conservative religious order and the other owned by the local government and inhabited by a secular literary association with leftist origins.

A little over two years later, Bolloré’s presence looms larger than ever in a country where the far-right now finds itself in a position of unprecedented strength.

In late-2021, Lagrasse found itself in the national media spotlight when it emerged that 14 eminent writers, including an editor of the right-wing Le Figaro Magazine and Nicolas Sarkozy’s former speechwriter, had been invited to stay with the order and write about the experience. Their contributions were compiled into a book entitled Three Days and Three Nights, which was effusively praised in Catholic and right-wing media, but was seen by local progressives as clear proof that Lagrasse had become a battleground in the right-wing religious crusade. The book was co-published by Fayard, part of Bolloré’s publishing orbit, with all proceeds going towards the €6 million renovation of the order’s part of the abbey.

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In mid-February 2022, to the sound of bagpipes, Vincent Bolloré and two of his sons, all of them dressed in traditional Breton costume, filed slowly into a gothic chapel to attend a celebratory mass in the village of Ergué-Gabéric, the family stronghold. The day marked the bicentennial anniversary of the family business. Now in his 70th year of life, and after 40 years at the helm, Bolloré used the occasion to publicly announce his retirement, passing the baton to his sons. “I hope I have pushed my successors to try and defend French culture,” he'd told the senate hearing on media ownership just a few weeks before the announcement.

A little over two years later, Bolloré’s presence looms larger than ever in a country where the far-right now finds itself in a position of unprecedented strength.

A recent article in the magazine L’Obs showed how relations between the RN and the Bolloré media empire have vigorously “warmed up” since the 2022 election. Yet playing kingmaker has never necessarily been one of Bolloré’s primary ambitions. “If it was, he would have chosen a different colt than Eric Zemmour to run in the last presidential elections,” said David Colon. “Rather, [Bolloré’s] broader aim is a political reconfiguration in France based on a rapprochement between the extreme right and the traditional conservative right.”

Meanwhile, barely a week goes by without CNews becoming embroiled in a new controversy. In late-February, the channel caused national outrage when it claimed in its Sunday religious segment that abortion was the leading cause of mortality worldwide just days before the Senate would vote on a bill to enshrine the right to abortion in the French constitution. Channel executives were swiftly called before a parliamentary commission of inquiry into CNews’s content and practices, where they insisted the incident was down to a “technical problem.” When Bolloré himself was called before the commission on March 13, he referred to abortion as “a terrible thing” that pits “two freedoms” against each other: “the freedom of people to decide for themselves” and “the freedom of children to live.”

Just four weeks previously, the State Council, France’s highest administrative court, had issued a ruling giving the media regulator Arcom six months to examine whether CNews was conforming to the country’s rules on balanced and independent journalism that features a variety of sources and political views.

But rather than being brought to heel by the mounting scrutiny, CNews has gone on the offensive, predictably recasting it as part of a coordinated effort to censor the channel, fueled by left-wing media clearly unsettled by its resounding success. “Above all, and this is the true reason for their attacks: CNews works,” Pascal Praud told viewers in an opening editorial to his show a week after the State Council ruling. “That’s the real problem.”