A year 2021 rich in events and of course, a year still marked by the health crisis which continues with the development of new variants of the coronavirus. The mediator of the Radio France antennas receives Matthieu Mondoloni, deputy editor of franceinfo.
Emmanuelle Daviet: What struck you in the past year?
Matthieu Mondoloni: There are plenty of events, but I’m not going to be very original. I think what struck me the most was obviously the continuing Covid epidemic. We started the year with the vaccination, so with a lot of hope, we remember, we were coming out of a difficult period.
And I also think of our listeners. I think of our journalists and the editorial staff, we still talk a lot about this, because we are in the middle of a 5th wave, because there are a lot of questions that arise around variants, around the disease, around tired hospitals, tired caregivers. So I think this is really the event that marked me, once again, in this year 2021.
What information was the most difficult for you to cover, to process?
There are several of them. There is one that was difficult to deal with, so not for me directly, but I was thinking more of the editorial staff, it is the opening of the trial on November 13. It was very hard because already, most of the journalists of this franceinfo editorial staff were present in Paris, on the evening of November 13, 2015, including some from elsewhere, and I am thinking in particular of Gaële Joly, Mathilde Lemaire, who were at the reporting service at the time, and who were outside the Bataclan, as reporters, they found themselves 6 years later, in the courtroom in court to follow this trial.
I think it’s something very hard to follow, it’s also very hard to hear testimony again, in particular the rather exceptional document that Gaële Joly had recovered, to quote it again, on these emergency tapes of the SAMU, from the night of the attacks of November 13 that we gave our listeners to listen to at the start of the school year, by contextualizing them, etc. But it was very harsh testimonies. And for me, it is perhaps the thing that marked me the most also in the difficulty, in the choice that had to be made in this information processing so as not to be anxious. So as not to scare. Not to recall bad memories, but also to listen and see, since there is a version on the website franceinfo.fr of this historical document.
Document which obtained the price of MFP, the French-speaking public media, it is a price awarded by a jury made up of listeners, and obviously to be listened to again on the site of franceinfo.
How, in this extremely dense news, where the choices are made daily in the angles to be chosen, the guests to be selected, how does the editorial staff maintain the bond of trust with the listeners, more and more numerous to listen to franceinfo?
As you recalled, we are now 4.9 million listeners daily on franceinfo. It is a record for the third radio station in France. We are very proud of this confidence and this confidence – to answer you – it is simply maintained, I think, by the reliability of the information, the fact that we verify our information, and that we do not does not deliver conditional information to the air, we take care, thanks to the franceinfo agency which systematically checks and then, only, once the info is verified, once the info is sure, we comes to give it on the air, on the website, on social networks.
And I think that it is also this confidence which is that of the listeners. It’s because they know that when they come to us as in other media, there is really this guarantee of confidence. If I heard it on franceinfo, it’s true.
As an individual Matthieu Mondoloni, what is the news that has marked you the most during the year?
I think it’s Afghanistan, and the fall of Kabul less than six months ago now. I think the six months will be mid-February; obviously franceinfo will be there. It struck me because it took us back 20 years, with what we saw of the invasion of Afghanistan, of the Taliban seizure of power at the time.
And besides, I remember that we looked for archival reports that we had been able to do or that other colleagues had been able to produce in 2001 and that certain reports could have been broadcast today.
Me, it made me very strange to tell myself that there was this kind of backtracking, finally, with these Taliban who took over Kabul, it was very complicated for us, for the editorial staff, to be able to deal with it because that it was necessary to be able to get there, that it was they who controlled the borders, that it was they who controlled the airport. We had also seen very complicated evacuations on the part of the West. So this is news that, personally, has marked me a lot.