RSF, 2025
Role: investigation, production, coding
Co-author: A. Froger
With the help of: H. Mzalouat, A. Delefortrie, V. Loriquet
Story editor: A. Bocandé
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) meticulously examined the content broadcast on France’s 24-hour news channels in March 2025 to see how they fare against the new criteria for “pluralism” — recent rules on how on‑air media should show diverse ideas and viewpoints established by the French broadcasting authority.
To find out, we developed a tool that took screenshots of France’s four 24-hour news channels (BFMTV, CNews, France Info, LCI), every ten seconds. As a result, from 1 to 31 March 2025, more than a million automatic, indiscriminate screenshots were taken. In total, nearly 700,000 news banners were analysed. While the information they contain does not allow us to measure the airtime of each speaker down to the second, the volume and frequency of the data provide a sufficiently precise snapshot of who is speaking and what is being discussed.
The results of this investigation are clear: while imbalances exist here and there, CNews is the only channel that blatantly and systematically strays from the broadcasting rules in force since July 2024. The privately-owned channel even appears to mock the broadcast regulator by displaying an on‑screen banner asserting compliance with its rules, which were largely trampled throughout the period of our study.
→ RSF report
→ Methodology
→ Libération’s second investigation