More than half the journalists at France’s only standalone Sunday newspaper have resigned after failing to prevent the arrival of an editor with far-right ties in a bitter dispute that has fanned fears of a further US-style polarisation of the country’s media, reports The Guardian.
“We didn’t win,” said Antoine Malo, a roving foreign correspondent at the Journal du Dimanche (JDD) and member of its editorial association. “We didn’t stop him, and now there’s a mass exodus. But the bigger fight will go on – from outside.”
The mainstream paper’s 100-odd journalists ended a 40-day strike – the longest media strike in France since the 1970s – on Tuesday after Geoffroy Lejeune, previously editor of the far-right weekly Valeurs Actuelles, took up his post as editor-in-chief.
The 34-year-old is a leading supporter of the xenophobic polemicist Eric Zemmour, who ran for the French presidency in 2022, promotes the racist “great replacement” theory, and has been investigated 16 times – and convicted on three occasions – for hate speech.
Lejeune is also a close friend of Marion Maréchal, the niece of far-right leader Marine Le Pen and another Zemmour ally. Under his editorship, Valeurs Actuelles was fined for racist insults after depicting the black MP Danièle Obono as a slave in chains.
His appointment comes amid the ongoing takeover of the JDD’s owner, the media arm of France’s Lagardère Group that also owns Paris Match magazine and Europe 1 radio station, by the conservative Catholic billionaire Vincent Bolloré. The 71-year-old entrepreneur’s Vivendi group also owns the Canal+ TV network and has transformed its rolling news channel CNews into a conservative talkfest for right-wing commentators, including Zemmour, often compared to Fox News in the US.
Founded in 1948, the JDD, which has weekly sales of about 140,000 and has in recent years been seen as broadly supportive of President Emmanuel Macron, should return to the newsstands in mid-August after a six-week absence, Lagardère has said. The paper’s editorial association reached a satisfactory agreement with Lagardère on a financial package for journalists who want to leave the paper, Malo said, but failed to secure several other safeguards, notably on editorial independence and content.
In particular the company refused to contemplate committing not to publish “racist, sexist and homophobic statements and, more generally, any discriminatory or hateful content”, a guarantee the association had demanded given Lejeune’s past record.
Bitter but still united staff, whose support for calling, renewing and ultimately ending the strike never slipped below 94% – said the imposition of Lejeune as editor-in-chief was clearly the prelude to a radical transformation of the title.