It is with great sadness that Mediapart learnt of the death on June 8th of Christophe Deloire, secretary general of Reporters sans Frontières (RSF, also known as Reporters Without Borders), following a brief battle with cancer. He was 53-years-old.
Our colleague had worked as head of the NGO since 2012 and, alongside his team, tirelessly deployed his energy for the cause of a free, independent and pluralist press, in France and around the world.
He joined in numerous Mediapart campaigns. In September 2013, we together organised a large public meeting at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris to defend the right to know, when the speakers sharing the stage included Julian Assange (WikiLeaks), Florence Aubenas (RSF), historian and sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon and the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin.
Three years later we joined together for the making of a programme about the independence of the press, at a time when the media landscape was already becoming distorted by the purchase of press titles and television channels, editorial standardization, censorship, the influence of shareholders, layoffs and pressure placed on journalists to toe the line. We proposed the establishment of an inventory of the generalised crisis in our profession, weakened by the concentration of titles owned by a few billionaires who are more concerned with the influence they can exert rather than the freedom of the press.
Christophe was also at our side when, in February 2019, we organised a press conference at Mediapart’s headquarters just a few hours after an attempt by police and prosecutors to search our offices. The move was part of an investigation opened by the public prosecution services, notably into the alleged invasion of privacy of President Emmanuel Macron’s former security aide and protégé, in contempt of our legal right to protect our sources – and which was later condemned by a French court which ruled in Mediapart’s favour.
Concerned about how the power of the tech giants was weakening the structures of the media ecosystem, Christophe, in an op-ed piece published in Le Monde in December 2022, called on political leaders to move beyond their partisan quarrels “in order to define the framework of democratic debate” and to free themselves from “the rules imposed by Facebook or Twitter”. He urged that, “in face of the arbitrariness of the heads of social media, our democracies must impose their principles”.
Aghast at the purchase of French weekly Le Journal du dimanche by French billionaire tycoon Vincent Bolloré, he denounced the appointment of hard-right journalist Geoffroy Lejeune as the title’s new editor in June 2023. “We are here to avoid fresh carnage within an editorial team,” he said when addressing an evening gathering in support of the weekly’s journalists who protested over Lejeune’s arrival, and who have today been replaced by others serving the interests of the reactionary billionaire Bolloré. Speaking on public radio France Inter a few days later, he warned: “There where Bolloré passes, journalism passes away. He is an ogre who digests media and transforms them into organs of opinion.”
In July 2023, the Élysée Palace chose him to lead the steering committee for the États généraux de l’information, a convention on issues around protecting press freedom, which was to conclude at the end of June. It was a mission which led to frank but always respectful exchanges of opinion between us and Christophe.
Alongside those new responsibilities, he continued his activities with RSF and took part in the campaign to secure the release from detention in Afghanistan of our colleague Mortaza Behboudi, who was finally freed in October 2023 after nine months in Taliban jails.
More recently, RSF won a historic victory in a case involving CNews, a TV channel owned by Vincent Bolloré. After a complaint submitted to it by RSF, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, in February ordered the French audiovisual and digital media regulatory body, the l’Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle et numérique (Arcom), to better ensure that CNews respects its obligations regarding pluralism and the honesty of its reporting.
We stand in solidarity with the RSF team, and address our sincere condolences to Christophe’s family and friends.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse