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Here Is Le News
France's international broadcast news channel, designed to counter the "Anglo-Saxon" values of the BBC and CNN, finally launches in December.
France 24 opens on December 6th on the internet: It begins broadcasting to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and parts of the US two days later.
France 2 is very much the brainchild of President Jacques Chirac: Its birth, however, has been far from trouble-free. Major French broadcasters resented finding themselves strongarmed into a project that wasn't even intended to show in France, while other journalists bemoaned the 80 million Euros the government is finding to fund the channel, while established news companies, including the daily newspapers France Soir and Libération struggle. There were also reports that the government had failed to allocate funding for the channel in 2004.
Chirac is said to have been inspired to create the channel in 2002. Following what many of his supporters felt was misrepresentation of his efforts to halt the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the plans for the Chaine Française d'Information Internationale (CFII) intensified.
French authorities were said to be particularly irritated by US network reporting of last November's riots, when widespread "Paris is burning" headlines (they said) exaggerated the scale of the trouble.
France 24's official mission is to "cover international news from a French perspective" and to "convey the values of France throughout the world."
On what makes certain news values peculiarly French it isn't clear, but it adds it plans to use them to promote "the diversity of opinion, thought and approach, using original journalistic angles... a spirit of debate, confrontation and contradiction (Ed - well that's more like it)... the French tradition of culture and art of living."
