By Michel Rose and Gabriel Stargardter
PARIS, Sept 4 (Reuters) – Conservative pundit Philippe Bilger was a mainstay of the French news channel CNews, known for its hard line on immigration and crime. But after he criticised Israel’s conduct in Gaza and defended the judiciary for convicting ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy, his services were no longer needed.
Bilger’s removal in January underlines a sharp hardening of CNews’ right-wing editorial line under reclusive billionaire owner Vincent Bolloré, attested to by two dozen current and former employees, regulators and rivals.
It is also increasingly significant for April’s presidential election, where far-right leader Marine Le Pen is making the running.
“I agreed with 90% of what was said on CNews,” said Bilger, an 82-year-old former investigative magistrate. “But I realised there was only one accepted line of thought.”
With an average audience share of 3.4%, CNews may appear marginal. But last year, it was the most-watched rolling news channel among France’s four major 24-hour outlets, and its influence reaches far beyond ratings.
CNEWS SHAPES AGENDA IN FAR-RIGHT’S IMAGE
Before President Emmanuel Macron announced his shock decision in 2024 to dissolve parliament, an adviser tipped off CNews presenter Pascal Praud, according to sources in Macron’s entourage and at CNews. When Reuters recently visited a presidential adviser at the Élysée Palace, CNews, a Reuters client, was on the television: testament to its pull on the political conversation.
“CNews is an ideological weapon and plays much the same role in France that Fox News plays in the United States,” said Philippe Moreau-Chevrolet, political communications expert at Sciences Po university in Paris. “It’s even more influential because France has a much smaller television market.”
CNews’ early, hard-hitting coverage of the 2023 killing of a white teenager in Crépol in southern France, which it framed as anti-white racism, was quickly followed by rivals.
“We could see our competitors switch within minutes to a story we broke,” a former CNews presenter said, speaking anonymously because the Bolloré group has sued ex-employees who had signed non-disclosure agreements.
CNews’ agenda increasingly follows the lines taken by Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN), from which the channel could benefit if, as polls suggest, Le Pen wins the election and fulfils her promise to privatise public broadcasting — long a target of CNews criticism.
“CNews clearly expects to cash in on the intellectual and media backing it has given (the RN),” Bilger said. “As long as it’s acting in good faith, I don’t have a problem with it.”
Stéphane Sitbon-Gomez, head of programming at public broadcaster France Télévisions, said Bolloré was using his media empire to denigrate public-service broadcasting in the hope of being rewarded with more licences under an RN government.
“It’s a form of disguised hostile takeover,” he said.
Bolloré for his part says he is not at war with public broadcasters, but has repeatedly questioned their €4-billion ($4.5 billion) annual cost to taxpayers.
CNEWS’ RUSSIAN LINK ALARMS FRENCH GOVERNMENT
The convergence with the far right’s worldview is perhaps clearest in CNews’ recruitment in 2025 of Xenia Fedorova, ex-head of the now-banned French unit of the pro-Kremlin channel Russia Today.
A July 17 Foreign Ministry analysis obtained by Reuters found that Fedorova’s television comments and newspaper columns, including on EU aid to Ukraine and Russia’s forced transfers of Ukrainian children, mirrored Russian official statements.
The analysis highlighted an example involving Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev.
On May 13, 2026, according to the state news agency TASS, Dmitriev said EU officials were “completely ignoring” documented corruption in Western aid to Ukraine. The next day, Fedorova wrote a column saying corruption was a “taboo” subject for the French press and suggesting that a €90-million EU loan to Ukraine risked being diverted.
“Drawing on her experience within the Russian propaganda apparatus, Xenia Fedorova does not need to be given instructions before appearing on television panels or writing an op-ed,” the analysis said. “She is fully capable of identifying and adapting arguments favourable to Russia for the French public debate.”
Retired general Bruno Clermont, a CNews defence consultant for four years, said Fedorova had got him fired in March.
“This has gone beyond freedom of speech. It’s playing directly into the enemy’s hands,” he said in a LinkedIn post. “She couldn’t bear this position not being held by a pro-Russian general.”
Fedorova’s lawyer, Emmanuel Piwnica, declined to comment. Neither CNews nor its holding company, Canal+, replied to a request for comment on Clermont’s or Bilger’s departures, or on the idea that they had been punished for deviating from editorial lines.
In March, the Interior Ministry, which had labelled Fedorova a Kremlin propagandist, expelled her for threatening both French interests and public order. Canal+ and Lagardère, the Bolloré-controlled groups that employed her, called her expulsion an attack on free speech.
CNEWS APPEALS TO FRENCH ANTI-ESTABLISHMENT INTERESTS
CNews rose from 1% market share at its 2017 launch to profitability last year, when it became France’s most-watched free-to-air news channel. Viewership has slipped this year as the Iran war has aided rivals, but its influence endures.
Supporters including ex-employees say CNews meets a demand for viewpoints marginalised by mainstream media. In a July interview with Bolloré’s JDD newspaper, CNews CEO Serge Nedjar accused competitors of mounting a “smear campaign” while quietly following the channel’s lead.
“We’ve championed topics, some of which were once taboo, that are now covered on every channel: insecurity, education, healthcare, purchasing power, immigration,” he said.
In rare public testimony to a parliamentary inquiry in March, Bolloré described himself as a “Christian Democrat” who was “not at war with anyone” and prayed for his enemies. He denied interfering in CNews’ output, though he said he occasionally “flagged” topics and recommended people.
“We’re free, so we displease,” he said.
That religious conservatism increasingly shapes programming, said Laurent Joffrin, former editor of the left-leaning daily Libération and a CNews panellist until 2023.
He cited the weekly religious programme “En Quête d’Esprit”, hosted by the head of a Bolloré-controlled Catholic magazine, which prompted outrage across the political spectrum in 2024 when it suggested abortion was the world’s leading cause of death. Presenters apologised the next day.
“He has a very traditional vision of religion and he believes France is in full decline, that immigration is overturning French society and … that Christian civilisation must be defended,” Joffrin said.
Since April, prosecutors have been investigating CNews for hate speech after panellists compared Bally Bagayoko, the new Black mayor of the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, to apes.
CNews declined to apologise, saying the comments had been misrepresented.
Beatrice Bellay, a Black Socialist MP from Martinique, said: “We’ve never seen such a vast deployment of financial resources behind racist, xenophobic, reactionary, and conservative ideas.”
HARD CONSERVATIVE LINE A DECADE IN THE MAKING
CNews’ trajectory began more than a decade ago. Bolloré took over its struggling predecessor, i-Télé, in 2015. After a 31-day strike the following year, he pushed out journalists resistant to his direction, according to a former Canal+ executive, and moved from costly field reporting towards cheaper panel shows.
The 2021 arrival of Eric Zemmour, an anti-Islam polemicist convicted of inciting racial hatred, cemented the rightward turn and doubled viewership before he left for an unsuccessful presidential run. Praud also built momentum with coverage of the Yellow Vest anti-establishment protests and airtime for vaccine sceptics.
Hard-left politician Julie Garnier, one of several left-leaning panellists recruited by Praud in 2019, said her views were initially listened to, but that “little by little, they respected them less and less”.
Macron initially viewed the channel as a useful conduit to parts of France that felt ignored by Paris, Bilger said. But sources close to Macron said he now sees CNews as hostile.
“The Élysée created a monster,” a former Macron minister said. “Now there’s nothing they can do. They’re like a deer caught in the headlights.”
CNEWS WARNED BY FRENCH MEDIA REGULATOR
French broadcasting rules require political pluralism, accuracy and independence. Thibault Bruttin, head of Reporters Without Borders, said CNews failed on all three.
“It’s essentially out of control,” he said.
Martin Ajdari, chairman of the media regulator Arcom, rejected accusations of passivity, citing a formal warning issued to CNews in June, and said further violations could still prompt action before the election.
“Some people think we’re too lax, others think we’re too intrusive,” he said.
Bollore told parliament it was “not pleasant” to have been disciplined, casting himself as a scapegoat of the establishment.
But he also said CNews would just have to be more “agile”, and Arcom is not about to diminish its influence.
“News channels can’t tell people what to think, but they can tell people what to think about,” said political scientist Julien Labarre, author of a 2024 University of California, Santa Barbara study that found CNews had France’s most right-wing audience and that its most faithful viewers were its most right-wing.
“That might be consequential in elections in terms of voting behaviour, but it will certainly be consequential in terms of the political debates this country will have.”
($1 = 0.8604 euros)
(Reporting by Michel Rose and Gabriel Stargardter; writing by Michel Rose; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
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