Coverage of international news on franceinfo

Lots of international news, Sahel, Morocco, Lampedusa, Libya, Iran, Armenia. Listeners send a lot of messages and questions to the Radio France broadcast mediator, Emmanuelle Daviet. To respond to them today, she is receiving Franck Mathevon, director of international information at Radio France.

Emmanuelle Daviet: How do journalists organize themselves to be on all fronts, listeners ask?

Frank Mathevon: So it’s true that we have had very busy international news since August. We could even add the war in Ukraine, which we continue to cover every day on franceinfo. We have a team of around twenty journalists in Paris, in the international editorial team, and around ten correspondents around the world, plus an army of freelancers, dozens of freelancers around the world. Every day, in fact, there are trade-offs to be made. A reporting mission costs money, it of course requires a journalist, and very often a technician as well. Is it relevant to go to this or that area? We ask ourselves the question every day.

There, for example, we decided on Tuesday to send our correspondents to Istanbul, Armenia. We obviously sent reporters to Morocco. Our correspondent in Rome went to Lampedusa last weekend, and we are also trying to work from Paris on all these subjects. So being present on the ground, but also working on our expertise in Paris, contacting specialists, obtaining testimonies, also working on diplomatic aspects, that necessarily makes for quite long days, especially at the moment, when the news is so dense. But here we are, we do this job with passion. And then we try to cover this international news in the most exhaustive way possible.

A journalism school student would like to know how you cover the news in countries that are difficult to access, like Libya?

So that’s an additional difficulty that presents itself, it seems to me, a little more often today. There are countries we can no longer go to anymore. Countries which sort journalists, where it is very difficult to obtain visas, where freedom of the press is restricted, and there are, in my opinion, more and more of them. We can cite a few: Iran, North Korea, Syria, Algeria, Venezuela, Russia, China. Either we cannot go to these countries, not at all, or the visa applications take very long and Libya is one of these countries. We have been confronted with this recently. The floods have killed thousands in western Libya, and we absolutely wanted to be there. We didn’t succeed.

Our correspondent in Jerusalem was sent to Cairo, who never obtained the correct documents, supposedly to be able to access the area via Benghazi. Many journalists from around the world have also been turned away at this Benghazi airport. Fortunately, a franceinfo reporter was able to accompany French civil security to Derna, the most affected Libyan city. And that allowed us to cover this news more or less correctly, even if he was very constrained in his travels.

In any case, we have had new proof of these restrictions, of these difficulties imposed on journalists, in certain countries. It must be said that in Libya, the country is split in two. There are two authorities of great administrative complexity and we see that very often, opacity, in a certain way, is the ally of these regimes.

Armenia said on Wednesday that at least 32 people had been killed, and more than 200 others injured, since the offensive launched the day before by Azerbaijani forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. The Armenian separatists of Nagorno-Karabakh are negotiating the reintegration of this region, disputed with Azerbaijan. This is an agreement reached after mediation by Russian peacekeeping forces. What are the difficulties your teams face in covering this news?

So there too, there are restrictions. Very quickly, as I told you, on Tuesday evening, we decided to send our correspondent to Istanbul, Armenia. Our freelancer in Georgia, who is also an expert on the Caucasus, was on site overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday. The main difficulty is that the very enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is therefore at the heart of the conflict, is not accessible to journalists. So obviously, that greatly complicates our coverage of this news, of this crisis.

In these cases, we try to collect as many testimonies as possible remotely, in Yerevan of course, but also from Paris. And this is what we also did in Libya and Iran, a year after the start of the protest movement, a year after the death of Mahsa Amini. Technology allows us today, sometimes from simple voice notes, to collect testimonies in countries like this, which are almost closed to journalists.