More than half the journalists at France’s only standalone Sunday newspaper have resigned after failing to prevent the arrival of an editor with far-right ties in a bitter dispute that has fanned fears of a further US-style polarisation of the country’s media.
“We didn’t win,” said Antoine Malo, a roving foreign correspondent at the Journal du Dimanche (JDD) and member of its editorial association. “We didn’t stop him, and now there’s a mass exodus. But the bigger fight will go on – from outside.”
The mainstream paper’s 100-odd journalists ended a 40-day strike – the longest media strike in France since the 1970s – on Tuesday after Geoffroy Lejeune, previously editor of the far-right weekly Valeurs Actuelles, took up his post as editor-in-chief.
The 34-year-old is a leading supporter of the xenophobic polemicist Eric Zemmour, who ran for the French presidency in 2022, promotes the racist “great replacement” theory, and has been investigated 16 times – and convicted on three occasions – for hate speech.
Lejeune is also a close friend of Marion Maréchal, the niece of far-right leader Marine Le Pen and another Zemmour ally. Under his editorship, Valeurs Actuelles was fined for racist insults after depicting the black MP Danièle Obono as a slave in chains.
His appointment comes amid the ongoing takeover of the JDD’s owner, the media arm of France’s Lagardère Group that also owns Paris Match magazine and Europe 1 radio station, by the conservative Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré. The 71-year-old entrepreneur’s Vivendi group also owns the Canal+ TV network and has transformed its rolling news channel CNews into a conservative talkfest for right-wing commentators, including Zemmour, often compared to Fox News in the US.
Founded in 1948, the JDD, which has weekly sales of about 140,000 and has in recent years been seen as broadly supportive of President Emmanuel Macron, should return to the newsstands in mid-August after a six-week absence, Lagardère has said. The paper’s editorial association reached a satisfactory agreement with Lagardère on a financial package for journalists who want to leave the paper, Malo said, but failed to secure several other safeguards, notably on editorial independence and content.
In particular the company refused to contemplate committing not to publish “racist, sexist and homophobic statements and, more generally, any discriminatory or hateful content”, a guarantee the association had demanded given Lejeune’s past record.
Bitter but still united staff, whose support for calling, renewing and ultimately ending the strike never slipped below 94% – said the imposition of Lejeune as editor-in-chief was clearly the prelude to a radical transformation of the title.
“We are not opposed to plurality in the media, far from it,” said Teresa Cremisi, a JDD columnist. “If someone wants to create a far-right news and opinion outlet, of course they should be able to. We’re opposed to a 180-degree change in editorial direction.”
Cremisi said the move “makes no sense at all economically”, noting that CNews was loss-making, Europe 1’s audience numbers were down, and Lejeune had been fired from Valeurs Actuelles because his far-right editorial stance had cost it readers.
“It’s obviously ideological,” she said. “Of course a media owner has the right to appoint an editor. But the appointment surely cannot be in total contradiction to the views of the vast majority of the staff and of the publication’s historic DNA.”
The dispute has fuelled growing concerns in France about an increasingly polarised media. “American-style polarisation is taking over,” said Christophe Deloire, general secretary of the Paris-based media freedom NGO Reporters sans Frontières.
“What predominates are not the shared principles without which a republic – and, more broadly, democracy – will not hold, it’s the ideological war between the two camps. The French version of Trumpists versus the east coast media.”
In an editorial devoted to the dispute, Le Monde said that if the future course of the JDD followed that of CNews and Europe 1 after their acquisition by Bolloré, “the plurality of opinion in the French press will once more be reduced”.
Bolloré has denied any ideological interventionism, insisting his interest is purely financial, and the French government has declined to step in, saying it cannot and should not have a say in disputes over commercial and editorial choices. Several political parties, however, including the Greens and the Socialists, have said they would boycott JDD interview requests in future, and several legislative proposals have been tabled aimed at guaranteeing media outlets’ editorial independence in future.
One in particular calls for the appointment of a new editor-in-chief at a newspaper that receives (as most French newspapers do) a state subsidy to be subject to the approval of its journalists – as is already the case at, for example, Le Monde.
The bill does not, however, have the support of the centre right Les Républicains party or of Le Pen’s far-right Rasseblement National, nor is is backed by media owners who see it as an unwelcome constraint in a commercially hostile media environment.
The government has announced a year-long inquiry into the media, starting next month and and led by an independent committee, that will examine not just editorial independence but other key issues such as fake news, ownership and public confidence.
Malo said a large majority of current JDD journalists would inevitably leave the title and many were forming an association that would press for a law on editorial independence and media concentration and aim to contribute to the inquiry.
“We want to make this about more than the JDD,” he said. “We want to use our experience for a better outcome for others. Reliable news is not possible without editorial independence; a healthy democracy isn’t possible without a free press.”
