Officially, he wanted to buy the magazine because there’s this whole narrative in the French economic establishment pushing “economic rearmament” and criticizing financial globalization in the name of economic sovereignty. Stérin, even while he’s this ultra-free-marketeer, promotes this rhetoric of economic patriotism, a little like Trump. One of his priorities is to bring attention to the deindustrialization of the country and to preserve its industrial forces. So, even though he’s an arch–social conservative who’s financed various organizations against gay marriage, or against minorities, this is also in his interest. So, he was interested in co-opting the brand of Marianne.

In any case, if the magazine had been bought by Stérin, I would have left. And a bit more than a third of the editorial staff, about 40 percent, viscerally did not want Stérin to buy the magazine, so they fought against it.

Since Daniel Křetínský bought the magazine in 2018, though, the magazine hasn’t been independent anyway. It’s a publication which is owned by a big businessman who has interests outside of the media. Marianne was the first publication which he bought in France.

I left Marianne in 2018 when Křetínský became the main shareholder in the magazine because I understood that the magazine would no longer be able to have the independence it had in previous years. One of the last independent French publications had become the property of a billionaire. That made it like more than 90 percent of the French press, which belongs to billionaires who have interests outside of the media, which [also] means that the state has its word to say in their activities.

For example, Dassault [which owns conservative daily Le Figaro] is a defense company, and Bouygues, the owner of broadcaster TF1, does construction and civil engineering. Then there’s Xavier Niel [who made his fortune] in telecoms [and has invested heavily in big publications like Le Monde]. All these billionaires invest in media companies both to gain influence and to immunize themselves against media attacks.

Křetínský operates completely within this framework.

Křetínský has interests in the energy sector, particularly in coal, and he also owns a pipeline which imports gas from Russia through Ukraine and Slovakia. He’s also invested in major retailers in Germany, and he bought the Royal Mail in Britain recently. He’s an investor with his finger in many pies, who became a billionaire in the Czech Republic.  And when he arrived in France, he quickly wanted to establish a good reputation with the powers that be — in this case Emmanuel Macron, whom he’s relatively close to — and to join the economic establishment.

Buying French press and media gave him a seat at the table with that establishment, because in France the economic establishment is still closely linked with the state and to political power.  The billionaires who own the media could easily be described as oligarchs because of their close links to political power.  This has been true for the past thirty years, beyond even the particular case of Macron.

We hear a lot about Bolloré because, like Stérin, he’s shown his colors strongly in favor of reactionary ideas and in support of the far right — and its most extreme representatives.

But today a large part of the Parisian economic establishment is interested in Trump and sees itself in Trumpism. It’s not just Bolloré. There’s Bernard Arnault, one of the richest men in world and head of the world’s largest luxury company, LVMH, who’s also moved closer to Bolloré. And there’s Rodolphe Saadé, who has all sorts of business interests in the United States and who signed a $20 billion deal in the Oval Office with Trump in March.

The extreme attraction to Trump of all these billionaires is really important in today’s France.

The reason for the focus on Bolloré by other French media and political leaders is because he did something very noteworthy. He bought Canal+, a pay cable channel like HBO, which was created under [1981–1995 French president] François Mitterrand by his former chief of staff André Rousselet.

Canal+ was created in the 1980s at a moment when the broadcast industry was being economically liberalized, and it played an important role at the time in the cultural hegemony of the governing left.

The channel was created in 1984, after Mitterrand abandoned his common program of economic reform together with the Parti Communiste Français and accepted the type of market liberalization the European Union wanted.

Canal+ was created at the same time as [anti-racism campaign] SOS Racisme. It was a time when an entire segment of what you could call the cultural left, which you could find around the Parti Socialiste, abandoned a program of economic reform to prioritize social issues, in particular to defend a French style of multiculturalism.

Canal+ was, and still is, an important actor in the French cultural industry because it was, and remains, the main financier of French cinema. So, it plays a key role deciding the types of films that get made, the types of scripts that get produced, and the values that are transmitted by these cultural products. Because Canal+ represents this legacy of the Mitterrand years, Bolloré struck fear into the hearts of many artists, filmmakers, journalists, and members of the creative classes who saw his purchase as a destruction of that legacy.

And in many ways, he’s done just that: he’s turned Canal+, and in particular its news channel, into what even the Élysée [President’s office] calls a “French Fox News.”

But this also has to be taken with a grain of salt. You’d be mistaken to believe that Macron has always been at war with Bolloré. Relations between the two have had their ups and downs since 2017. Sometimes Bolloré has clashed with the Élysée, and sometimes he’s pursued rapprochement with it. You can see all this in Bolloré’s business activities in Africa, which he eventually sold to the international arms company MSC, owned by the family of Alexis Kohler, Macron’s [former] chief of staff.

On the other hand, Macron has used the Bolloré group strategically, to move the center of French political gravity to the right and to push the Left out of the political [mainstream].

So yes, there’s often a focus on Bolloré, [when people are] criticizing media ownership today in France. But when you remember that over 90 percent of France’s media owners are billionaires, you’d be fooling yourself to think that they’re investing in a disinterested manner and have no influence on the editorial line of these publications, particularly when it comes to investigations.

It’s been going on for a while now, but has accelerated in recent years with the economic decline of the French press. Obviously, [concentrated] media ownership poses a democratic question, but very few political leaders touch the question, even on the Left. While there is a criticism of media there, including its ownership, it’s rare for a political leader to go on a television show and denounce its ownership.

Foreign journalists who work in France are always surprised by the proximity that French journalists, and in particular political journalists, have to French political power. They’re also surprised by their docility and their incapacity to contradict political leaders, particularly when they’re in power.

French journalists have a reputation for being extremely loyal and deferential to political power, to say the least. They’re also known for being extremely timid about openly confronting the President of the Republic, who in the Fifth Republic has the concentrated power of the entire system.

Generally, their colleagues, especially in the Anglo-American press, are more accustomed to an investigative press which keeps its distance from power. In terms of being a check on power, foreign journalists are often a little shocked by the Parisian microcosm.

At the same time, the reduction in resources for the American and foreign press in general means that the foreign correspondents in France often find themselves being part of that Parisian microcosm, distant from the working-class neighborhoods within the city or the suburbs outside its walls.

I think that it can be an advantage that these journalists have some distance from the French model and are often able to point out its shortcomings on topics like integration.

At the same time, I’ve found that they’re often very influenced by messaging from the government and the president. They’ll often oversimplify the political opposition within the country, and they haven’t taken the time to understand that Macron isn’t this liberal leader who’s concerned about civil liberties, etc. Despite the fact that there have been some spirited criticisms of Macron in the New York Times about this, I’ve found that much of the foreign press in France has had a hard time understanding that Macron is much further to the right, and much more reactionary, than the image they have of him. And when it comes to Macron’s pro-business rhetoric, the foreign media has often focused more on appearances and superficial messaging instead of the reality of Macron’s economic record, which is actually quite negative.

While they’re quick to criticize the Parisian bubble, many of these foreign correspondents quickly find themselves influenced by it, whether that’s because they enjoy it or just out of professional necessity. The result is that they no longer have the distance necessary to correctly analyze French society or understand the mistrust the French population has for those who have been in power for over seven years now.

It’s also just as much because Emmanuel Macron has targeted messaging abroad. He’s done this by prioritizing foreign journalists and giving them access, and there’s no easier way to please a journalist than to give them access to those in power.  And this has often worked very well.

There are still some independent investigative publications that remain, notably online, and they’re still trying to do investigative work independent from billionaires. There are also newer investigative units in public broadcasting that didn’t used to exist, though they’re constantly threatened. The tradition of French journalism is much more one of commentary and opinion than investigations or reportage. That’s just how French journalism developed.

Despite this, there’s a generational shift where young French journalists are more interested in producing investigations and reportage. Of course, the economic pressures on French journalism have considerably reduced the spaces where you can produce these types of investigation.

For me, after ten years of [conducting] investigations into Emmanuel Macron and power, among other things, it’s very revealing that while numerous editors in the Paris publishing market are interested in my investigations as books, for the moment I don’t have any job offers at a publication in Paris.

For now, I’m finishing a book that investigates the business world in France. And I’m also relaunching my newsletter, The Big Picture.

In Paris doing your work, revealing information, and pursuing many investigations often brings you more disadvantages, and even retribution that affects your professional career.

In the words of a colleague who I met with recently, I’m out in the wild now.