In France, Too, Billionaire Tycoons Are Silencing Their Critics
In France, right-wingers love to pose as defenders of free speech. Yet the takeover of media by a cast of billionaire pro-Trump tycoons means that just a handful of individuals have a veto over huge swaths of the press.
French billionaire Vincent Bolloré stands next to then Finance Minister Emmanuel Macron at the opening of a new plant in western France on January 15, 2016. (Fred Tanneau / AFP via Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Marlon Ettinger
Attacks on free speech are growing. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Donald Trump’s administration has launched a cynical cancel-culture campaign against anybody not deferential enough to Kirk and the ideas he stood for.
Take the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) pressure that led to the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s show in September. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr leaned on ABC parent company Disney to ditch him after Kimmel joked about Trump’s attitude to Kirk’s death. Carr even promised “more to come” for broadcasters who he mendaciously claims aren’t upholding the FCC’s “public interest” standard by “insulting” the president.
Disney soon folded. It was a neat example of just how much influence conglomerates continue to have on America’s media landscape — and how sensitive they are to pressure from the US government.
In France, there’s been much hubbub over a series of acquisitions of historic media properties by Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire who promotes a reactionary political agenda. Yet, less in the spotlight is the preexisting dominance of France’s media by a coterie of billionaires, all with varying interests and a desire to avoid scrutiny.
This billionaire control of French media has left it vulnerable to the same sort of pressures Trump is currently subjecting the US’s servile media to. And with a growing class of pro-Trump tycoons in France, its media isn’t far behind America’s own in the race to the right.
Marc Endeweld is one of France’s best investigative journalists. He has spent the last decade producing deep investigations into who holds power in France and what they do with it, often through the lens of Emmanuel Macron’s government.
Endeweld left the center-left magazine Marianne in March, citing the unfavorable winds coming from the publication’s billionaire ownership.
In this interview with Jacobin’s Marlon Ettinger, Endeweld discusses the pro-Trump billionaire class dominating French business, their media interests and ulterior motives, and how foreign correspondents in the country sway in the wind at the slight push from their ownership.
Before you quit, it was reported that the billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin wanted to buy Marianne. Stérin is an ultra-free-marketeer reactionary who lives in Brussels to avoid taxes, and is relatively close to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. Why did he want to buy the magazine, and what was the reaction within its staff – and what was your reaction when you heard he wanted to buy it?
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.
What’s his influence on the French media landscape, and why did he get into the French media game by buying these publications? Also, you already left Marianne once before in 2018. What’s the story there?
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 in America about Bolloré and his effect on the media landscape. But like you say, there are also people like Křetínský, and others as well, so it’s not just Bolloré who has influence on France’s media.
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.
There’s lots of reporting in the French media about America. But there’s a lot less reporting in America about what’s happening in France. What stories do you think the foreign media is missing in France? And can you talk a little bit about how the role of English-speaking foreign media in France? You talked about the pressures that these billionaires exert on the French press. Do these same pressures exist on foreign media in France?
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.
To finish up – is there anywhere in the French media now where there are real investigations taking place? Where do you go next?
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.