France's 24-hr International TV Network to Hit Airwaves

Posted 04 December 2006 @ 10:39 am EET     Print     Reprint     E-Mail     Comments

PARIS (AP) - France's first round-the-clock international news television network hits the airwaves this week, offering a French viewpoint to rival CNN and the BBC.

France 24 will launch its main parallel French and mostly English channels after first debuting via Internet streaming late on Wednesday, with TV kicking off on cable and satellite on December 7.

"We are positioning ourselves as an international channel equipped with a French eye," Gregoire Deniau, France 24's editorial director said.

"We have an approach which is more distanced and closer to the south than the other international news channels," he said.

As Qatar-based Al-Jazeera launched its English-language TV news channel mid-November, France 24's journalists were already gearing up for their debut at the network's new Paris hub.

Although the France 24 website will be trilingual in French, English and Arabic from the outset, television programmes in Arabic will only begin in mid-2007, and Spanish is set to follow in 2009.

"As to Al-Jazeera, it represents a very specific viewpoint, it defends, even in its Anglophone version, the eye of the Middle East on the rest of the world," Deniau added.

France is famous for defending the French language against a creeping dominance of English President Jacques Chirac stormed out of an European Union summit earlier this year when a fellow Frenchman spoke in English.

But the new French 24/7 TV network says it is broadcasting in several languages in order to reach large population groups, although it stresses it carries a single message.

Alain de Pouzilhac, the channel's chief executive officer, has said that France 24 would challenge "Anglo-Saxon" views presented by BBC World and CNN International by relying on "French values".

He said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper at the end of October that the channel would highlight "diversity (and)... confrontation, without forgetting the culture and French art of living."

First mooted several years ago, the project gained momentum with the US-led invasion of Iraq because Chirac was reportedly miffed by the way CNN and the BBC presented France's opposition to the war. Chirac has said he hoped the channel would place France "at the forefront of the global battle of images".

With a mix of news, economic news, culture, sports and weather, with features and debate, the channel is targeting opinion leaders, and will initially be broadcast in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the US cities of New York and Washington DC.

State-funded, France 24 is a private, joint venture between France's leading commercial and national public television networks, TF1 and France Televisions, and will be funded to the tune of 86 million euros (110 million dollars) by the government for 2007.

France 24 will produce some of its own pictures but also rely on its managing companies and partners, including Agence France-Presse and Radio France Internationale.

For several weeks, the network's 380-strong staff, including 170 journalists, have been doing dry-runs at its three-storey headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, on Paris' southern outskirts. Some 80 million households in more than 90 countries will be able to receive the network, it has said.