PARIS, 1 October 2003 — A French 24-hour international news channel designed to rival the BBC and CNN should be on the air by late next year after state approval of a public-private consortium to run the broadcaster, an official tasked with drawing up the project said yesterday.
“This channel will exist,” said Bernard Brochand, as he released his report on what has become known as a “CNN a la francaise”. Brochand, mayor of Cannes on the French Riviera, said Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s announcement Monday that France’s leading private television network TF1 and state broadcaster France Televisions had been selected to jointly run the news channel meant it would be operational by “autumn or winter 2004”.
State financing for the television channel - whose annual budget for the first five years has been put at 70 million euros ($80 million) — would be fast-tracked, he said.
Its programs would not be available to homes in France, where TF1 has its own all-news channel, LCI, but would be beamed across the rest of Europe, as well as to Africa, the Middle East and to Central Asia.
It would employ up to 150 journalists and rely on contributions from state radio network Radio France Internationale and AFP, he said. The French foreign ministry, currently headed by Dominique de Villepin, would likely be in charge of the channel, Brochand said, though he added that the government would formally decide that aspect later.
Even though Brochand said “it is absolutely essential that this channel be independent,” he also stressed that its vocation was to be “the voice of France.”
The project squares with ambitions held by President Jacques Chirac and other officials for France to raise its profile in the influential arena of international television, which has hitherto been dominated by the United States’ CNN and Britain’s BBC.
Their longstanding desire to get such a channel off the ground picked up momentum after the diplomatic confrontation over Iraq which pitted Paris against Washington and London.
