Gilles-William Goldnadel is a lawyer and essayist. Every week, he deciphers the news for FigaroVox. He has just published
War Journal.
It is the West that is being assassinated
(Fayard).
To discover
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In view of the whimsical as well as revolting decision taken by the Council of State, ordering Arcom to label the columnists and unlabeled guests of a private television, I will not beat around the bush.
I will only borrow the two usual ones that my intellectual obsessions have long publicly assumed: the intolerance of the far left and the contempt for pluralism displayed by public broadcasting.
But before that, a word on the absence of pluralism in the judicial and administrative world.
With his particular urbanity, Jean-Éric Shoettl, former secretary general of the Constitutional Council, wondered in these columns, on February 14, about a possible ideological bias having governed the aforementioned decision by these two united chambers of the highest administrative jurisdiction .
The presence at their head of a former deputy of Martine Aubry is not likely to make this questioning less urban.
But it is so in the homeland of claimed insolence.
It is in bad taste to criticize the government of progressive judges while on the other side of the ocean, it is recommended to criticize a Supreme Court, dominated by necessarily retrograde conservatives.
This is how no one will come and demand accountability from the Council of State.
As no one will have dared to ask the Constitutional Council, chaired by a former socialist Prime Minister, where the hell he had found this undiscoverable principle of fraternity, which had authorized impunity to a Cédric Herrou, who went looking beyond the mountains, for untitled foreign migrants.
But let's stop rehashing, and let's take this first path which leads us straight to this intolerant extreme left which refuses the idea of having lost its media monopoly, after having lost the battle of ideas.
Also read: “CNews is free to make its editorial choices and its columnists, even if I don’t always like them”
The instrument conveying his anger is called Reporters Without Borders.
This NGO is, unfortunately, no longer the freedom-loving association created by the former libertarian Robert Ménard, a supporter of total and unrestrained freedom of expression.
RSF has followed the extreme left-wing path of other organizations, such as the Human Rights League, Médecins Sans Frontières or Amnesty International.
Note also that its president was chosen by the current authorities to chair the General States of Information, of which we do not know what they will become, in view of the current controversy.
For almost a decade I have been denouncing every day the most glaring failures of objectivity or plurality of points of view.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
The target of this extremely left-wing vindictiveness is called CNews.
Or more precisely the success of CNews.
Or even more precisely, the popular enthusiasm that CNews arouses.
Which corresponded to a vital need.
The French people suffered from the dead silence protecting the facts relating to illegal or irresistible immigration and related security issues.
Those that I called “hidden authorities” took care to conceal the truth that only social networks, described with contempt as an unfortunate sphere, revealed under an inelegant cloak.
And now a television station, made up of staff who were reluctant to tolerate criticism of vulgarity or a lack of finesse or humor, broke down the rickety left-wing media house.
All that remained was to invent, in a panic, the card system.
An impossible system and banned by the CIVI.
Arcom itself does not know how to proceed.
How many assistants will she have to enlist to probe the backs and souls of guests and columnists who are not politically voluntarily listed?
What will be their area of expertise?
Political archeology?
Ideological psychology?
How to describe a former socialist MP who left his party five years ago?
And then what epithet will be written on the data sheet?
Right or left ?
Red or brown?
Progressive or reactionary?
Nice or bad?
I'm wrong to laugh about it.
I am now taking my second path.
A real way of the cross.
The one that leads to my assumed obsession with the revolting lack of pluralism, characterizing public broadcasting.
For almost a decade I have been denouncing every day the most glaring failures of objectivity or plurality of points of view.
Worse still, in my
War Diary
, published a month ago, I document the bitter daily chronicle of public radio stations which have kept Hamas victim reports or UNRWA reports as reliable sources of information. without confronting them with contradiction.
Victim of media ideology, conscious or Pavlovian, when you are held, you hold us.
In the Orwellian system of registration provided by the Council of State, we can still bet that it will be easier to describe the orientations and preferences of the staff of the public audiovisual service.
Gilles-William Goldnadel
I add that in this healthy obsession that I fully embrace, I do not only act in my capacity as president of Avocats Sans Frontières or as an essayist.
I act even more in my capacity as a taxpayer, undivided co-owner of French public broadcasting.
Its specifications, squeezed into the double-closed drawer of its current managers, require much more than for BFM, CNews or M6, an obligation to respect pluralism and objectivity of information.
It is an understatement to say that it is trampled under foot and trampled.
In the Orwellian system of registration provided by the Council of State, we can still bet that it will be easier to describe the orientations and preferences of the staff of the public audiovisual service.
It will necessarily be necessary, as a journalist from France Inter made no mistake, who welcomed the decision of the senior magistrates with very restrained joy.
Easy to describe the head of the foreign column, formerly of
Libération
and founder of
Rue89
, eminent member of Reporters Without Borders, whom I described previously.
Easy to politically situate the person responsible for the morning show, previously at the head of
Libération
.
Easy to locate the chronicler of the history of political ideas, still currently at
Libération
.
Easy to locate those responsible for “Earth squared” who proudly claim to be committed ecologists.
Easy to locate the female team of “So far so good”, led expertly by a columnist who only yesterday, with talent, ran a weekly sexuality section in
Le Monde
.
Easy to place a comedian who hit his spiritual column for having described the Israeli Prime Minister as a
“Nazi without a foreskin”.
Guillaume Meurice established, in fact, a parallel between Benyamin Netanyahu and Nazism at the microphone of France Inter, a few days after the Hamas attacks on October 7.
He was also a member of the “Charline gang”, the daily show “C’est encore nous” on France Inter.
The presenter had also drawn adolphin mustaches on a Jewish and right-wing candidate during the last presidential elections.
Also read: Samuel Fitoussi: “What the Council of State could have said about CNews”
To conclude my journey, I will give the most recent example of this ideological tropism of public service that I have been denouncing for two years.
It dates from yesterday, Sunday, and took place at 9:55 a.m. on France Info, as I recorded it precisely on a rather approximate and subjective way, like whistleblowers against the “extreme right”.
In the crueler reality, these are anonymous activists terrorizing advertisers, whom I would place on the far left, and who have caused
Valeurs Actuelles
and Boulevard Voltaire to lose a lot of money but none to
Mediapart
or StreetPress, to the delight of our public radio.
But perhaps, to save money, we should ask these Sleeping Giants to file speakers in our monitored media for free?
I'm really wrong to laugh about it.