France is to launch a French-language news channel next year in a long-awaited attempt to challenge the dominance of the American view of world current affairs, the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said on Thursday.
The government will provide â,¬30-million in start-up funding for the channel, which will ”allow international broadcasting that will express the diversity to which our nation is attached,” Raffarin said.
The CII (International Information Channel) project, better known in France as ”CNN àla Francaise”, is a pet project of Jacques Chirac’s and was first announced shortly after his 2002 re-election.
It was initially greeted with widespread scepticism, seen as yet another Canute-like attempt to preserve French language and culture in the face of the inexorable onward march of English.
La langue de Molière benefits from a battery of laws and directives to protect it at home, but in an age of global communications and the internet it has lost out to English abroad and is now the 11th most widely spoken language in the world. Nor is it any longer the language of diplomacy, even within Europe.
But after France’s outspoken opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq last year the channel is seen as a valuable tool in promoting France’s language and its view of global affairs.
President Chirac, in a vision shared by China and Russia, favours a ”multipolar” view of world affairs and is concerned about the ”unilateralist” domination of the United States.
The leading private broadcaster, TF1, and its state television group, France Télévisions, will mount a 50-50 venture that will employ 240 people and make use of the existing networks of AFP (Agence France Presse) and RFI (Radio France Internationale).
An estimated 260-million people around the world speak French as a native or second language, compared with about 700-million thought to speak English with some degree of competence. CII, which will not be broadcast inside France, is therefore likely to transmit some programmes in languages other than French — including English.
France’s 35-hour working week will be radically eased under proposals outlined by Raffarin to allow companies and employees to negotiate individual overtime agreements.
The unpopular prime minister also pledged to cut France’s near-10% unemployment rate to below 9% next year. – Guardian Unlimited Â