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The French public broadcaster is at the centre of a political row as a parliamentary inquiry examines the “neutrality, workings and financing” of state TV and radio, while the media are expected to play a significant role ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
The rightwing UDR party, an ally of Marine Le Pen’s far-right the National Rally (RN), set up the inquiry amid far-right claims that public TV and radio has a bias against them. Le Pen, whose party is expected to reach the final round of the presidential race, has said “there is a clear problem with neutrality in the public service broadcasting” and that she would like to privatise it.
The French parliamentary inquiry, which will run until March, comes amid tension over public broadcasting in Europe – with Trump suing the BBC for up to $10bn over cuts to a 6 January speech, and unions at the Italian public broadcaster saying Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government had too much control.
The backdrop to the inquiry is the rising dominance in France of the private media empire owned by the Catholic conservative industrialist Vincent Bolloré, which critics say is giving a platform to reactionary voices and boosting the rise of the far right. Bolloré’s CNews is the most watched news channel on TV and is highly critical of the state broadcaster.
The parliamentary commission was set up after two journalists were secretly filmed having a coffee with Socialist party officials. The video clip was released in September by a rightwing magazine and shown on Bolloré’s channels amid allegations that the journalists were colluding with the left to damage the right.
The journalists – Patrick Cohen, who broadcasts on politics on public radio and TV, and Thomas Legrand, a former radio journalist, now a political columnist for the daily Libération – said having coffee with politicians was part of their job and the video was misleadingly edited. They have filed a legal complaint for invasion of privacy.
Questioned at the inquiry, Cohen said the video clip was referenced in 853 news sequences on CNews over a two-week period, and was “amplified by a propaganda operation without limits, aimed at denigrating and destroying the public service that I represent”.
Legrand told the inquiry: “France has entered an era of Trumpism.”
The parliament hearings have been heated. The Socialist MP Ayda Hadizadeh, sitting on the inquiry panel, said it was turning into a “tribunal” by politicians who wanted “to kill public broadcasting”. The far-right RN MP Anne Sicard said her party was “treated like the enemy” by the state broadcaster.
Jérémie Patrier-Leitus, of the centre-right Horizons party, who is heading the proceedings, said the inquiry was not “against” state TV and radio.
The public broadcaster France Télévisions, which includes four national TV channels and 24 regional channels, is a key financier of films, drama and documentaries and is the top French media outlet. Radio France has several national and local stations and dominates podcasting.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has been critical of the public broadcaster in the past and scrapped the TV licence fee, while a long-term funding model remains to be defined. In December, Macron began to distance himself from Bolloré’s CNews. The Élysée Palace published a social media video criticising the channel for what it called “disinformation” over Macron’s support for media certification.
Alexis Lévrier, a media historian at the University of Reims, said: “In Europe, public broadcasting is being attacked in a way that seeks to weaken it as a counterpower … The specificity in France is that we now have a political-media empire [owned by Bolloré] of unprecedented strength … this group is now at the heart of the media space and it has an agenda. In that agenda, the public broadcaster is a target.”
Bolloré, in a senate hearing in 2022, denied political or ideological interventionism.
Adèle Van Reeth, the head of state radio station France Inter, told the parliamentary inquiry: “The preservation of French public broadcasting is a sign of a democracy in good health.”
