Arya News - Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash from broadcasters and rival parties over a proposal to certify “serious” news outlets.
Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash from broadcasters and rival parties over a proposal to certify “serious” news outlets.
The row erupted after the French president suggested that the media should carry a label awarded by professionals to distinguish them from purveyors of fake news online.
Critics say his drive against disinformation is an “Orwellian” attempt to control information just as he loses his grip on power and risks curtailing freedom of the press and expression by creating a “Ministry of Truth”.
The Republicans, France’s mainstream conservative party, launched a petition denouncing the “scandalous and dangerous” move.
“Emmanuel Macron has no mandate from the people to designate good and bad media outlets,” the text declares. “The certification of news would amount to introducing an official truth: that is not democracy.”
Critics say Mr Macron risks curtailing freedom of the press and expression - Valerii Shtykalo/iStock
Bruno Retailleau, the Republicans’ leader in the Senate and former interior minister , accused Mr Macron of flirting with the dystopia of George Orwell’s 1984. “France does not need a Ministry of Truth,” he warned, accusing the president of crossing a red line on freedom of expression.
Eric Ciotti’s Union of the Right for the Republic, a Right-wing splinter party, has circulated a similar petition, demanding that Mr Macron “renounce this project which recalls the excesses of authoritarian regimes”.
On the nationalist Right, Jordan Bardella , president of the National Rally, called the plan an “authoritarian temptation” by “a man who has lost power and seeks to maintain it by controlling information”. Marine Le Pen said the objective was “obviously” to control the media, calling the idea “extremely dangerous”.
But the most vitriolic backlash – which sparked the political reaction – has come from the powerful media empire of Vincent Bollore , the ultra-conservative Catholic billionaire often dubbed “the French Rupert Murdoch”. His television news channel CNews, radio station Europe 1 and recently acquired Sunday newspaper Journal du Dimanche (JDD), have become key platforms for Ms Le Pen, Mr Bardella and figures such as Mr Retailleau and the former president Nicolas Sarkozy .
Jordan Bardella, president of the National Rally, said Mr Macron ‘has lost power and seeks to maintain it by controlling information’ - Thibaud Moritz/AFP
Tensions between the Breton tycoon’s camp and Mr Macron had been brewing ever since it accused the centrist president of exaggerating the Russian threat to “stir up fears” and detract from his own failings.
The JDD accused Mr Macron of a “totalitarian drift” and of wanting to “bring to heel the media that do not think like him” under the guise of fighting disinformation.
Pascal Praud, CNews’s star presenter, told viewers the president was seeking a “middle way between the Ministry of Truth and Pravda under Brezhnev”, the latter reference clearly designed to paint the Elysee as a neo-Soviet censorship bureau.
Philippe de Villiers, a veteran hard-Right former minister, went further still, saying Mr Macron was taking France closer to totalitarianism than at any time since the Second World War.
A source close to Bollore told The Telegraph that he had felt impelled to buy up print and broadcast media to give the French Right a voice given the “Left’s longstanding grip over the country’s state media”.
His camp fears that his own outlets would be left out in the cold by any official or semi-official scheme and branded as unreliable or extremist for challenging the Elysee.
The president’s allies insist that this is precisely the opposite of what is being proposed.
Vincent Bollore, a billionaire media tycoon, is often dubbed ‘the French Rupert Murdoch’ - Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg
The idea, first floated at a meeting with readers of La Voix du Nord, a regional daily, and repeated in the Vosges before an audience of local newspapers, is for a voluntary label drawn up “by journalists, not by the state” to indicate that an outlet follows basic rules of ethics and fact-checking.
“I think it is important that there is a certification done by professionals who can say ‘those are people who are serious [and] those are not people who give information’,” Mr Macron told readers in Arras.
But he immediately added a caveat that his camp says his critics have glossed over. “It’s not the government or the state that can say, ‘this is information, this is not’,” he said. “If the state verifies, that becomes a dictatorship.”
His office reacted with unusual ire to the Bollore media’s claims. In a video posted on X, it spliced front pages from the JDD, clips of Mr Praud and comments from Mr de Villiers, and stamped them with “Beware, fake news”, before replaying Mr Macron’s own words that “it is not for the state to verify”.
“Talking about the fight against disinformation itself causes disinformation,” the accompanying message concluded.
“A form of virality must be met with a form of virality,” said an Elysee source.
Mr Macron has long been the butt of fake news, from rumours about buying an Aston Martin to a viral, pro-Russian claim that he took cocaine on a train to Kyiv . This has fuelled his determination to regulate social media, pushing for stricter oversight, algorithmic transparency and even a ban for under-15s.
Yet his counter-offensive risks backfiring, said Arnaud Mercier, who has published a book on disinformation and manipulation in the media, notably because “he is so unpopular his words no longer carry the same weight”.
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Maud Bregeon, a government spokeswoman, has flatly denied any plan for a state label. “The government is not going to create this or that label intended for the press, still less a Ministry of Truth,” she said.
Yet suspicion persists, fuelled by Mr Macron’s own chequered record with the press. Since 2017, he has tried to choose which journalists accompany him, relied on Elysee-produced videos and YouTube-style clips, and limited access to reporters more than any of his predecessors.
He also initially normalised the Bollore camp’s rise by encouraging ministers to appear on CNews and the JDD in the name of “pluralism”, and cultivated Mr Praud so assiduously that the presenter was reportedly told of last year’s snap election plan before the prime minister.
Even Le Monde, a centre-Left daily that broadly supports efforts to police foreign interference, has warned that Mr Macron is “not the best placed” to lead a crusade for trustworthy information.
In a sharply worded editorial, it argued that by personally pushing for media quality himself, he “runs the risk of being suspected of being both judge and jury” and “fuelling the mistrust of the conspiracy theorists he intends to counter”.
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