But I joke. France wants its own version of CNN to spread its propaganda, er, worldview:
- It turns out that French President Jacques Chirac does have a battle plan. Late last month he called for a 24-hour news channel, dubbed "CNN à la française," that will push the French point of view on world events. The aim is to correct the bias in U.S. media with "independent and balanced" coverage, explains Martin Even, audiovisual attaché at the French embassy in New York.
....The front-runner is LCI, a cable news channel owned by $2.7 billion (sales) Télévision Française 1. Never mind that TF1 has $500 million in debt; the government may pony up as much as $100 million to create the channel. The other major contender is state-owned Radio France International. (RFI President Jean-Paul Cluzel says there's room for a player whose point of view lies somewhere between CNN and Al Jazeera.)
The idea is to set up a network of foreign news bureaus, much like that of the BBC World Service and CNN, and broadcast throughout the Middle East and Africa, where the vast French colonial empire once held sway. Oh, yeah, and in the U.S., too, via American cable and satellite companies. "If you're not seen in Washington and New York, you may as well not exist," says Even. [Forbes]
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