In a slick, glass television studio in an office block on the southern outskirts of Paris, a new front in the war on ”Anglo-Saxon” cultural imperialism will open up on Wednesday night. President Jacques Chirac’s decade-old dream of a ”CNN àla Française” to rival BBC World and United States 24-hours news channels is finally to launch after years of wrangling and in-fighting, promising a revolution in world news.
France 24 seeks to report international news ”through French eyes”. Not only will it offer a French perspective on world events from the Middle East to Madagascar, it also aims to reflect a certain French ”art de vivre”, or way of life. It will explain the news with a perennial favourite of French TV: the argumentative debate show where philosophers in corduroy battle on current affairs. Dry runs have included topics from Rwanda to the plummeting fortunes of the French rugby team or the changing tastes for Beaujolais nouveau.
At least 20% of the programming will focus on culture and lifestyle, embracing everything from world museums to cuisine, fashion and French chocolate. It will broadcast simultaneously on two channels, in English and French. But broadcasting in English — which when used by the French leader of the European employers’ group Unice in March this year prompted Chirac to storm out of an EU meeting — will not dilute the French ethos. Station executives hope the English debate shows will be even more heated than the French. Broadcasts in Arabic and Spanish will follow at later dates.
The idea of a French 24-hour news channel was first dreamed up when Chirac was prime minister in the late 1980s and became one of his election pledges for the presidency in 2002. The following year, when Chirac tried to slow the US drive to war in Iraq and some media in the US and Britain mocked his efforts, the need for a news channel with a French voice gained currency. Chirac now wants to launch it as part of the president’s legacy of projects that continue France’s struggle against the global dominance of the US. Earlier this year he unveiled plans for a Franco-German search engine to compete with Google and Yahoo!, called Quaero, Latin for ”I search”. It was quickly dubbed ”Ask Chirac”.
But although the ageing president will launch France 24 at glittering gala in Paris’s Tuileries Gardens, the station’s chief executive, Alain de Pouzilhac, is determined not to let it become ”Chirac TV”. ”We have public money but we are an independent channel,” he told the Guardian. Nor will it be a vehicle for the centre-right presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, who has been accused of being too close to TV stations. ”I know Nicolas very well. I don’t believe we will have a problem with that. He hasn’t called me,” Pouzilhac added.
The channel is aiming at a similar number of viewers to al-Jazeera’s English service, about 75-million households in more than 90 countries, describing itself as a ”third way” between the Qatar-based station and CNN.
But its birth has not been smooth. It is an unprecedented partnership between France Télévisions, the country’s public broadcaster, and TF1, one of Europe’s largest private TV channels, two groups which are normally rivals. Union protests and management disagreements have abounded — even the channel’s name, pronounced France vingt-quatre, was hotly contested. Some French politicians have voiced fears that the station couldn’t generate the funds to compete internationally. François Rochebloine, of the centrist UDF, called it an ”uncertain bet”, warning that the taxpayer could have to pay for it twice, once in the licence fee and again in a satellite or cable subscription.
France 24’s images will largely come from its parent TV stations as well as other partners such as the agency Agence France Presse and Radio France International, prompting allegations that it will just be a round-up of other channels’ content.
With a team of 170 journalists of an average age of 30 and public funding of â,¬86-million for the first year, France 24 is dwarfed by its competitors. CNN has a budget of â,¬1,2-billion and a staff of 4 000.
But at its headquarters, where a banner outside proclaims: ”Everything you are not supposed to know”, journalists say the station will influence world politics. Mark Owen, formerly of Granada TV, who will present the English morning news bulletins and debate show, said: ”Take the conflict in Lebanon this summer. If Jacques Chirac’s call for a ceasefire — which didn’t even make BBC or CNN — had been reported earlier, it could have brought about an earlier resolution of the conflict. If Chirac’s call had been reported more widely it maybe could have saved thousands of lives. That was a story calling out for a French angle, given the historic links to Lebanon.”
The France 24 website will launch on Wednesday night and the station, available on cable or satellite, goes live on Thursday. There will be a 10-minute news bulletin each half hour and in between a series of magazines with topics including ”humanitarian affairs”, lifestyle, culture, and a monthly show on ”economic intelligence”, explained as spying wars between ”hypercompetitive companies”. The Week in France will tackle politics and society, and other weekly specials will come from Asia, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East.
Outside the glitzy building, the critical reaction has been favourable. Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Centre on the United States, said: ”It’s not an anti-American operation. It’s more than that. France didn’t have an international news channel to compete with many countries that have. What is remarkable is that is has taken such a long time to come about.” – Guardian Unlimited Â