Chirac's TV dream hits English language barrier
Thursday March 16 2006
in Paris
FRANCE'S television dream of mounting a challenge to CNN and the BBC has suffered an embarrassing setback after claims that the new channel would broadcast most of its output in English.
Starved of realistic funding for a 24-hour news station, CII is due to be launched in December for transmission initially to Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Its annual budget, met by the French taxpayer, will be £50m (€72.4m), about an eighth of CNN's.
President Jacques Chirac promised a "CNN a la francaise" in the 2002 election campaign and is committed to a station that will "spread the values of France and its global vision throughout the world".
It was always known that part of the channel's output would be in English and Arabic, but champions of the French language were appalled at suggestions that it would feature less than four hours a day.
Jean Pierre Paoli, right-hand man to CII's head, Alain de Pouzihac, defended the proposal on the grounds that English was a universal language, adding: "We are hardly committing an act of high treason."
Marc Favre d'Echallens, of the Association for the Defence of the French Language (DLF), expressed outrage that a station designed to give a "French vision" of world affairs would contain so little in French.
"After celebrating Trafalgar with the English and making light of our own great victory of Austerlitz, it probably follows that a publicly-funded French television channel should end up broadcasting in English," he said. A spokesman for the new channel said: "Eighty per cent of our target audience will be anglophone. If we want pluralism in the field of international television news, we cannot ignore this." (©Daily Telegraph, London)
