France’s most-watched news channel, the 24-hour BFMTV, has suspended one of its longest-serving presenters and launched an internal investigation into news packages linked to an Israeli disinformation unit calling itself “Team Jorge”, reports The Guardian.
Rachid M’Barki, an anchor at BFMTV since its launch in 2005, is on leave and at the centre of the inquiry into multiple stories broadcast on his show, Le journal de la nuit.
He was suspended last month, after a member of Team Jorge suggested to undercover reporters that the group was secretly behind a BFMTV news report about the Monaco yachting industry.
The report, broadcast last year, suggested sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs were damaging the yachting industry in the Mediterranean principality.
When a reporter approached BFMTV to ask questions about the integrity of that package and several others broadcast by the channel, M’Barki was suspended.
The channels said in a statement that the packages did not go through the usual editorial validation procedures.
Team Jorge sells hacking and disinformation services to political and corporate clients who want to conduct covert influence-peddling campaigns. The team was exposed by the Guardian and an international consortium of reporters led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories.
The leader of the unit, Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who uses the alias “Jorge”, was filmed boasting about his ability to manipulate the media to spread propaganda, by undercover reporters posing as potential clients.
In one secretly filmed meeting, Hanan told the reporters he was able to have stories broadcast in France and then played a video clip.