France’s version of GB News and Fox News is caught in a racist firestorm

The shocking segments about Bagayoko, who represents the extreme left France Unbowed party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, recycled rancid colonial-era racist stereotypes. The country has seen nothing like it since a similar incident more than a decade ago, when a candidate from Marine Le Pen’s National Front – now called National Rally, and topping opinion polls – compared Christiane Taubira, the then justice minister who hails from French Guiana, to a “female monkey”.

CNews is protesting that the remarks by psychologist Jean Doridot and philosopher Michel Onfray have been “taken out of context”. But animalising Black French citizens who are elected officials may be a step too far even for proprietor Bolloré’s virulently anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim shock-jock channel. The Paris prosecutor has now placed CNews under investigation for “public insult of a racist nature” and for inciting cyber-harassment “on the basis of the colour of his skin” that the mayor was subjected to on X following the broadcasts.

The scandal unfolded shortly after March’s municipal elections, when Bagayoko said he planned to partially disarm local police officers in his Paris region. The mayor also suggested council officials who did not have “allegiance” to his ideas could find jobs elsewhere. 

Contestable, yes, but that did not stop “popular philosopher” turned conspiracy theorist and antisemitic influencer Onfray, suddenly waxing Darwinian.

“We’re not in a primitive tribe,” proclaimed Onfray. “You have the dominant male who decides: you will eat, you won’t eat; I will have the females, you won’t have the females.”

Before Onfray’s putrid analogies, psychologist-hypnotist Doridot had also weighed in with his own brand of deeply regrettable bloviation.

“It’s important to remember that Homo sapiens are social mammals and part of the great ape family,” he lectured as CNews showed footage of Bagayoko. “And therefore, in any community, in any tribe – our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in tribes – there is a leader whose role is to establish authority.”

Bolloré launched CNews in 2017, two years after he bought the TV giant Canal Plus. The channel rose to prominence – and ratings success – as it surfed the populist wave of far right-dominated revolts and street violence during the Yellow Vests movement of 2018. For the past few years, it has been one of France’s most-watched news channels, with millions of daily viewers. 

It is a hybrid of GB News and Fox with a distinctly French flavour of far-right diatribes against migrants, Muslims and Macron, interspersed with Monty Pythonesque features on how to reconstruct medieval châteaux.

CNews is a proud recidivist, accumulating a swelling list of convictions for breaching France’s strict laws against “public insult on the basis of origin, ethnicity, nationality, race or religion” and incitement to hatred, violence or discrimination. There have been rulings and fines totalling more than 630,000 euros for broadcasts targeting Palestinians, Algerians, Arabs and Muslims, blaming migrants for bedbugs, saying knife crime is “cultural” and the fault of Islam, and that “Muslims don’t give a damn about the French republic”. 

Only in February, CNews was fined 75,000 euros after former junior minister for European affairs Noëlle Lenoir claimed “millions of Algerians pose major risks,” because they  “could pull out a knife in the metro, in a station, in the street, anywhere, or take a car and drive into a crowd.”

Fines have also often been imposed directly on figures appearing on the channel. In 2019, failed extreme right politician and former journalist Éric Zemmour, was convicted of denying crimes against humanity when he falsely claimed on the channel that Marshal Pétain, leader of the collaborationist Vichy France regime, saved Jews in world war two. 

In 2021, Bolloré had to pay out 200,000 euros for “incitement to hatred” and “incitement to violence” after Zemmour slandered all unaccompanied minor migrants as “thieves,” “murderers,” and “rapists.” 

Predictably, Zemmour has tried to insert himself into the current controversy, too. Appearing on another channel, he deliberately mispronounced the mayor’s name as “Bali-Balek” and repeated the lie that the mayor had described his outer Paris municipality as “the city of Blacks” (la ville des noirs). 

In fact, Bagayoko spoke of “the city of dead kings” (la ville des rois) – meaning the Cathedral of Saint-Denis, where French monarchs from Clovis to Louis XVII are buried. 

The Bagayoko scandal has sparked demands to close CNews, with multiple complaints filed by parliamentarians and a legal complaint by the new mayor himself. The network was reprimanded in the National Assembly as the government came under pressure from left wing deputies, including Communist Stéphane Peu, who demanded: “How long are you going to tolerate CNews and Bolloré’s media outlets as lawless zones?”

“Racism is not an opinion,” declared prime minister Sébastien Lecornu. “The mayor of Saint-Denis is a public official and deserves particular protection.” Interior minister Laurence Nuñez condemned the remarks as “ignoble” and “absolutely unacceptable”.

Green MP Steevy Gustave, whose father is from Martinique, said: “What still disturbs some people is not what we do, it is simply that we are here.”

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The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo responded with a satirical front cover titled “CNews: Cradle of the racism of humanity”. It depicted Onfray, naked and with a small penis, as a primitive figure brandishing a club behind a starkers Praud, armed with a banana skin and trying to whack Bagayoko.

Of course, CNews is having none of it and “formally contests that any racist remarks were made”.

Chief anchor Praud thundered that Lecornu, the “Macronie” (the “Macron galaxy”) and the mainstream media were in cahoots as an “extreme centre” that has effectively “pledged allegiance to the far left”. Like the dyed-in-the-wool deep state conspiracy monger he is, he added: “The system may be faltering but it knows how to defend itself. This is a preview of the presidential campaign to come, where these political camps share an interest in masking reality from the French,” he said.

CNews pundit Mémona Hintermann-Afféjee, a former journalist from Réunion island, protested that she and the channel could not be guilty of racism because there is a “galaxy of colours” in her family, with “very Black nieces” and “very white nephews”. Now her home region, a French overseas territory, is pushing to remove her name from a high school. 

When Bagayoko organised a march against racism, antisemitism and discrimination in front of his town hall on April 4 that attracted thousands of supporters, Le Pen’s loathsome party spokesman Julien Odoul responded that there was “not an ounce of racism” towards the mayor, making the preposterous call for a protest “against anti-white racism”. 

And the racist rot against Blacks in French politics continues to spread. A new investigation has been opened after three Black far left parliamentarians and a mayor received the same vile letter abusing them and showing scenes from the notorious Tintin in the Congo comic book, with racist speech bubbles including “‘Escaped from the Beauval Zoo”.

Meanwhile, CNews proprietor Bolloré is facing a criminal trial later this year on charges of “corruption of a foreign public official” in West Africa. His Bolloré group is accused of having provided low-cost advisory services to presidential candidates in Togo and Guinea in 2010, in return for control of the countries’ main ports.

The mogul who officially retired in 2022, has his own private island off the coast of his native Brittany. He likes to advertise his piety, and in late March was handed a softball platform to do just that in an ongoing National Rally-hijacked parliamentary “inquiry” into public broadcasting.

He spoke at length about his faith, complained that French public TV and radio cost too many billions of euros and pleaded for “mercy” towards his former pet presenter, convicted child sex offender Jean-Marc Morandini. Bolloré also whined about the “injustice” of the “confiscation” of the frequency of his now-defunct populist channel C8, which did not have its license renewed in 2024 after several complaints about remarks by the far right politicians it platformed.

“I am the archetypal common enemy, the ideal lightning rod, everything the caste dislikes,” Bolloré sniffed as he insisted some of his friends are Muslims. “Our media outlets tell the truth. Or in any case, they say things that are different from the others.”

Close to Nicolas Sarkozy, Bolloré shares spiritual moments with the disgraced former president . After 20 days in prison late last year, he wrote a widely mocked memoir complaining of the limp, damp baguettes” in jail. It was swiftly published by Bolloré’s book company, Fayard editions.

Sarko then made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, flying in with wife Carla Bruni and Bolloré on the billionaire’s private jet before immersing himself in the icy waters of Saint Bernadette’s Grotto of the Apparitions during a ritual bath, wearing only a cloth. 

Bolloré’s CNews runs on the same model as GB News: a tight rotation of the same reductionist anti-immigrant, anti-West, anti-Muslim, anti-Europe themes, a stable of ideologically aligned presenters and guests, and a format in which “debate” is just fellow-traveller agreement, with fascism-adjacent discourse framed as edgy confrontation and “just putting it out there”.

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It sits at the centre of a broader Bolloré ecosystem that breathlessly advocates a “union of the rights” – meaning the hard right and the extreme right. Since his highly contested acquisition of Journal du Dimanche, the once-respected Sunday paper has become a propaganda rag imposing the nationalistic nativist gospel of extreme right figures like Zemmour, his partner Sarah Knafo and the Le Pen– Jordan Bardella camp.

Bolloré has done similar with radio station Europe 1, and he has bought up prestigious, formerly centre left French publishing houses like Grasset and Fayard and turned them into book factories for hard and extreme right politicians and pundits. His ambition of building a giant network of right wing media is a template copied from Fox News/Sun/NY Post owner Rupert Murdoch and evidently admired by GB News’s Paul Marshall, who also owns two other totems of the British right, the Spectator magazine and culture war blog Unherd.

A detailed study by the international non-profit organisation, Reporters sans Frontières, using a banner screen capture system developed with investigative journalist Antoine Schirer, analysed a month of output across France’s 24-hour news channels. The findings were stark.

Immigration, Islam and identity appear seven times more often on CNews than on rivals, insecurity three to four times more. More than 100 violent incidents were covered in a single month, twice as many as competitors combined.

“The results of this investigation are clear: CNews is the only channel that blatantly and systematically strays from the broadcasting rules,” RSF said.

Schirer told The New World that “a very small number of themes dominate” CNews’s output, with at least 40 per cent of airtime devoted to immigration, Islam and insecurity. That is a content mix that would be familiar to any viewer of GB News or its American inspiration, Fox News.

He added: “This is a channel of opinion. We measured around 13 per cent actual news.” And, he continued: “Pascal Praud is the head of the locomotive, sometimes drawing up to a million viewers.” On Praud’s show, Schirer said, up to 25 per cent of airtime is his own opinion, something not seen on rivals like BFMTV or LCI.

RSF’s analysis rests on unusually granular data. Screenshots were captured every ten seconds across all 24-hour news channels for a month, producing a vast dataset, including the constant stream of on-screen banners shaping editorial framing.

“We tested it on GB News,” says Schirer. “It works. On Fox News, we would likely observe similar patterns. All these channels are, in different ways, inspired by Fox News.”

RSF’s head of investigations Arnaud Froger says CNews presents “one-sided coverage of controversial topics” and saturation of a narrow set of issues, then uses late-night slots “to fill airtime requirements” and thus claim a lack of bias. Left wing commentators can be found on the channel, but often only in the ‘dead hours’. Prime time is reserved for fear, and approving coverage of Marine Le Pen.

Froger told The New World the network is France’s only channel repeatedly sanctioned for failing to control racist, hateful or discriminatory content. “CNews is a repeat offender,” he said. “Despite warnings and heavy fines, little has changed, because the regulator has failed to fully exercise its powers.”

While the watchdog sleeps, CNews employs as a pundit Xenia Fedorova, former head of the banned Russia Today (RT) in France. She is routinely platformed to parrot her idol, Putin, smearing Volodymyr Zelensky, denying Moscow’s war crimes in Ukraine and attacking Nato and France’s  European allies. 

And of course, just as Fox News did with Trump and GB News does with Farage, CNews continues to pump out National Rally talking points ahead of a French presidential election that is now just a year away, with Bardella a clear favourite to win.

But there is another way. As fury raged around CNews, Bagayoko was speaking at the anti-racism rally, where he said that he only recognises one category of citizens.

Referring to a Jewish religious leader who could not attend because of the Sabbath but sent a video message of support, the new mayor said: “When Rabbi Belinow expresses his solidarity with me here, he is not expressing his solidarity for Bally Bagayoko. He is expressing his solidarity for all those who are our fellow citizens, because here, whether we are from the Jewish community, whether we are Muslim, whether we are Catholic… we are France. We claim it, and we want to build a society together.”

Emma-Kate Symons is an Australian journalist based in Paris, who regularly appears on the France24 channel