In a context of proliferation of false information, Radio France considerably strengthens its verification systemto act as a benchmark of confidence for the French with information verified, sourced, and for that there are methods.
Unique structure within an audiovisual medium, the Agence franceinfo created in 2016 and broadcasting 20,000 dispatches per year, has established itself as a reference. Today it becomes Agence Radio France. To talk about it at the microphone of Emmanuelle Daviet, the mediator of the antennas of Radio France, Estelle Cognacq, the editorial director of franceinfo.
Emmanuelle Daviet: We are going to talk about the Agence Radio France, but first of all the Agence franceinfo, created six years ago. It is an information verification system which will therefore now be extended to the service of all Radio France antennas. It is a unique organization in the French audiovisual landscape. First of all, why did you create an internal agency at franceinfo in 2016?
Estelle Cognacq: Let’s say that in a continuous news channel, and which has several antennas, a radio antenna, but also digital antennas, social networks, we needed to centralize our information. We sometimes had inconsistencies between our antennas, between what was said on the ground by our reporters and by our presenters. So, we needed to bring together in a single place everything we could say about a piece of information. And that’s what the Agency was created in part for.
At the same time, we wanted to resume our ways of working, in particular on the source of information, and we wanted to establish a charter which, really indicated: “franceinfo can provide information: in what context, in relation to which source, in relation to what feedback from the field”. So we wanted to combine this need for centralization with this information verification charter.
Is there a link between the creation of the agency and the attacks that occurred a year earlier, in 2015?
Yes, it confirmed our decision. And then, we had another episode which is the announcement of the “false” death of Martin Bouygues, which took place a little in stride. So we had already imagined this Agency a little and all of a sudden, when we had this wave of attacks, our police-justice department in fact centralized all this information in a single email addressed to the editorial staff regularly.
And there, we said to ourselves, we don’t give any information from other media, press agencies, our colleagues, and we only give the information that we have double-checked ourselves. And that is what reinforced the idea of creating this Agency, and extending this principle to all information. So, you should know that today on franceInfo, when we don’t have information and it comes out elsewhere, and it is not correctly sourced for us, that is to say formulations that you hear a “source close to the investigation”, “source close to the file”, that we do not know who is speaking, and that this person is not legitimate to speak. We systematically recheck.
The editorial strategy of the Agency is the validation and verification of information, even if it means delaying the distribution of information until it is certified for all the antennas. There is no more this race to who will give the first, an info?
Yes, that was indeed the assumption that had to be adopted six years ago, when we made this decision, which was not necessarily easy when you are in competition with non-stop news channels. For a long time franceinfo was alone, but this is no longer the case with the web and with continuous news TV. So that has changed.
It was necessary that our presenters and all the journalists accept this postulate. So what we do is that as soon as information comes out, if we don’t have it, of course, we always investigate. We have our own information and we get it out. But when it is released elsewhere immediately, we set up this verification, both by our services within franceinfo, but it can also be with France Bleu, for example, and other channels in the group, and we put running this verification machine. So we will sometimes lose a few seconds, a few minutes, an hour, and rarely more.
Emmanuelle Daviet: Are these principles implemented within the Agency likely to restore or maintain trust with auditors?
Estelle Cognac: In any case, it is our will, and it is indeed what we wish to do through this Agency. Today, there is mistrust towards political and scientific institutions, for example, but also the media. We can clearly see, and we have seen it with the Covid crisis for example, or with the episode of the Yellow Vests before, that confidence in the media has decreased.
There are surveys every year, and so what we also wanted was to try to re-establish ties and re-explain our profession a little, how we work on all these fundamentals of journalism, to try to tell our listeners, look how we work. You can trust our work.