On May 9, at midday, the France Culture channel hosted the Ivorian novelist Gauz. Known for his militant anti-colonialism, the author went into a scathing tirade denouncing “the new laws recently passed by Moussa Darmanian [sic] and Bornztein [sic] “. The French auditor will immediately have identified the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin and the former Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne. At the same time, he will have understood that the writer reduced these personalities to their ethnic origin, Darmanin and Borne being respectively of Armenian and Jewish origin, two peoples who suffered genocide. We will have recognized this as the kind of joke in bad taste which the founder of the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the comedian Dieudonné were masters of not so long ago.
But we were on France Culture. What would have sparked a scandal elsewhere went unnoticed. No one flinched, especially not the host. Neither seen nor known ! The example could not be more significant of this impunity which often characterizes public channels.
If a demonstration were needed, the think tank liberal and conservative Thomas-More will have provided it to us. From February 19 to 23, the institute sifted through the broadcasts of three French public radio and television stations, classifying the speakers according to their political leaning. The results are astonishing. Of the 587 people studied that week, half had no detectable orientation, 25% were more to the left, 21% more to the center (on the side of the majority in power) and only 4% to the right. On a channel like France Culture, the contrast was even more striking: barely 1% of speakers could be classified on the right! Remember that in France, according to an IFOP survey, 43% of French people consider themselves left-wing and 46% right-wing and that in the last presidential elections, the vote for parties clearly identified with the right reached 40.19% in the first round.
Certainly, the study has its share of subjectivity – Radio France has also criticized the categories used – but such damning results can hardly be dismissed out of hand. They illustrate the ideological bias that everyone can see daily on these channels, although they are financed by all French people. Moreover, hadn’t the director of France Inter, Adèle Van Reeth, described her channel as “progressive radio”? As for Delphine Ernotte, president of France Télévisions, she boasted of not representing “France as it is […] but as we would like it to be. In a more consensual era, this bias would perhaps have gone unnoticed, but certainly not at a time when opposition is growing in society.
This study is not the only one to demonstrate the extent to which some of our elites practice interpersonal relations. And not just in France! Suffice it to cite last year’s poll by the Harvard University student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, with 1300 teachers. Result: 77.1% of respondents consider themselves to be on the left (liberal) or very left (very liberal), 20% say they are moderate and barely 2.9% consider themselves conservative or very conservative. It is difficult not to notice the absence of this sacrosanct “diversity”, although praised to the skies, among these professors who form the country’s elites, and in particular the media elites.
This self-talk explains a lot of things. He explains, for example, why the foreign press described the president of the Italian Council as “post-fascist” when it would never occur to anyone to describe left-wing figures as “post-communists”, “post-fascists”. Maoists” or “post-Trotskyists”. However, there is no shortage of them! We understand that with this imbalance and the shaky reading grid that it implies, everything quickly becomes “extreme right”, from opponents of so-called “inclusive” writing to those who want to moderate immigration or who consider that a man can never become a woman, as almost everyone who has preceded us on this earth has thought for centuries.
This inflation is characteristic of the self-consciousness that reigns in many media. For several years, the expression “extreme right” has become a catch-all which serves to confuse currents as different as those of the nationalist Marine Le Pen, the conservative Giorgia Meloni and the anti-Islam populist Guert Wilder . There is no trace here of a current that would like to exclude itself from representative democracy, with which the “extreme right” has historically been associated. There would be no more words to name it.
This made this left-wing woman, former environmentalist and majority advisor Rachel Khan, say that “the far right no longer means anything”. This refusal to think about the complexity and diversity of the world is largely due to this “ambient progressivism” described by the general director of the Thomas-More Institute, Jean-Thomas Lesueur, in which the public audiovisual. This quickly becomes a vicious circle. The more you listen to elevator music, the greater the shock when the elevator music resonates. 5e by Beethoven.
This in-betweenness is suicidal at a time when gaps are widening in public opinion. Perhaps this is one of the causes. By the way, wouldn’t it be interesting to subject Quebec’s public channels to the same test?