A RW French billionaire described as the French Rupert Murdoch is trying to gain control over satellite TV in Africa

[highplainsdem]

Wikipedia article on him - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Bollor%C3%A9 - and I'll add some excerpts from it below these tweets.

From Twitter, posts about an article in The Continent, a digital pan-African newspaper, from the co-founder and international editor. Thread starts here, full text below.

Link to tweet

Simon Allison
@simonallison

This is the most alarming story I've worked on in a while. The French billionaire Vincent Bollore, described as "the French Rupert Murdoch", is trying to bring Africa's biggest broadcaster - MultiChoice, that's DStv, ShowMax and SuperSport - into his "right wing media empire".




Bollore has already created the "Fox News of France" which spews racist, anti-Muslim and climate denialism on the regular. What is he planning to do when he has direct control over 30 million TV screens in Africa? This would be a near monopoly on satellite TV on the continent.




Nevermind his history of allegedly corrupt relationships with African presidents. The guy is currently on trial for bribing the President of Togo. Canal+ suspended critical channels at the request of the junta leader in Guinea.


In France, @RSF_inter has said that Vincent Bollore's approach to media ownership is a "real threat to press freedom and democracy" (Bollore says he has no ideology and is a "very gentle and good natured" ). Hard not to conclude that the same is true in Africa.


Full story in @thecontinent_, download it here:
https://www.thecontinent.org/

Note: I've edited that last tweet because he'd mistyped the Twitter handle for The Continent and corrected it in a tweet below. I made the correction in this post instead.


From Wikipedia, on Vincent Bollore:

The Bolloré Group also has important positions in the economies of several former French colonies in Africa (in particular Ivory Coast, Gabon, Cameroon, and Congo).[13][14][15] On 24 April 2018, Bolloré was brought into custody for questioning concerning perceived links between discount rates for political consulting (through Havas) and port concessions in Lomé, Togo; and Conakry, Guinea. He was subsequently indicted for "corruption of foreign agents", "falsification of documents", and "complicity in breach of trust".[16][17] If found guilty, he could face a maximum fine of €1 million and up to 10 years' imprisonment.[18]

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Bolloré has been investing massively in media for several years. He is the main shareholder of the Vivendi media group, which holds a 10-percent stake in Universal Music Group (Bolloré himself owns directly another 18%) in addition to numerous TV stations and newspapers.[24] In 2022 he has also bought the largest private radio station in France, Europe 1 in time for the 2022 French presidential election.[24][25] A 2022 essay in The New York Times highlighted Bolloré's media influence, noting the prominence given to far-right, "proto-fascist" politician Éric Zemmour by television news channel CNews.[26]

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In January 2021, Bolloré and two other Bolloré executives pleaded guilty at a Paris court for supplying €370,000 worth of communication services to president of Togo Faure Gnassingbé during their presidential campaigns.[29] He attempted to deny the charges at first, but his defense was "turned against him" instead, which caused him to admit his guilt despite initial denial.[30]

Since September 2022, Bolloré's channel C8 has been found in several controversies concerning its integrity (evidence being found that the presenters and guests on the channel were being ordered what to say) and the inflammatory language used in its program TPMP, with the channel being sanctioned 3.5M€ for having publicly insulted a France Insoumise deputy.[31] The insults were directed at the deputy right after the deputy cited Bolloré as one of the ultra wealthy people who have been making the French suffer in poverty, and his businesses causing deforestation.[32]

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. From The Continent's article:

Bolloré has a controlling interest in Vivendi, which owns Canal+ and its various stations/satellite systems.

The clearest example of the “Bolloré system” is the recent history of what is now CNews, a French television channel owned by Canal+. In an investigation, Nieman Reports – a media watchdog based at Harvard University – tracked how news there was replaced with often extreme opinion, creating what it dubbed the “Fox News of France”. This opinion “routinely make derogatory statements about migrants and have called on Muslims to renounce their faith”, playing a role in “mainstreaming far-right ideas about immigrants overtaking the French population”.

Operation Stop Bolloré – a coalition of dozens of prominent French journalists, academics and activists – claims this ideological stance is reflected across the media empire and is “unprecedented in our history”. In a 2022 statement, the group said: “The channel [CNews] becomes the place for the broadcast of hateful, racist, homophobic, sexist speech, that of the promotion of identity entrepreneurs, of incitement to violence, that of the trivialization of conspiracy, of climate denialism.”
...
The Bolloré Group’s controversies are not limited to France or the media. In West Africa it has been accused of breaching journalistic ethics on at least two occasions to favour incumbent leaders. Most recently, in December, “Canal+ quickly cut the signal of three channels critical of [junta leader] Mamady Doumbouya from its offerings, at the request of the Guinean authorities,” according to The Africa Report.

Another controversy was reported by RSF in 2021– an example of how Bolloré allegedly influences his media assets to further his own business interests. “Bolloré, who has many business interests in Togo, got Canal+ to include a puff piece about Togo and its president in its current affairs programming, as if it was regular journalistic reporting,” it said.

[Celerity]

2. Vincent Bollore, the conservative billionaire taking on France's mainstream media

Having created a French version of Fox News, he now has one of the country’s most influential newspapers in his sights

https://www.ft.com/content/bc4efd16-bf65-4b00-b1ef-1be42d8d1581

https://archive.ph/rViXd



Last year corporate raider Vincent Bolloré celebrated his supposed retirement from his family-owned media and logistics empire. But that has not stopped him from making waves in French business and politics. The 71-year-old conservative billionaire is now mounting an assault on a bastion of French mainstream media: the prominent weekly newspaper, the Journal du Dimanche. His allies have appointed the controversial former editor of a far-right magazine to run the paper, prompting outraged journalists to strike and triggering a wave of concern from leftwing and centrist politicians and celebrities. Sitting out retirement on a beach was probably never on the cards for the financier whose name has become synonymous with bare-knuckled dealmaking and proximity to power (he is a close friend of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who celebrated his 2007 election victory on the billionaire’s yacht). 

Nicknamed the “little prince of cash flow” for his business acumen, Bolloré celebrated his departure from the family company with a Catholic mass and a party in his home region of Brittany. A devout Catholic, Bolloré wore traditional Breton clothes as bagpipes played at the event timed to coincide with the group’s 200-year anniversary. One of his sons, Yannick Bolloré, who replaced his father at the helm of the family’s media group Vivendi, called the ceremony a “moving and really joyful moment” during which retired factory workers and managers feted the patriarch. “Working with a genius is always wonderful,” he told the Financial Times. Asked about the nomination to the JDD of editor Geoffroy Lejeune, whose last magazine was convicted for running afoul of France’s hate speech laws, the younger Bolloré insisted it had nothing to do with Vivendi or his father. 

Vivendi has yet to finalise its acquisition of the JDD’s parent company Lagardère, he said, so legally could not have made the choice. “We had no part in the decision,” he said. But many in Paris media and business circles see the hand of Bolloré behind the move to install Lejeune. After all, they point out, the tycoon has form. In the past six years, Bolloré has put a conservative stamp on the media outlets he controls in what people who know him say is a concerted strategy to build a counterweight to what he sees as the leftist bias of French media. Yet that agenda is never admitted openly. When senators grilled him last year in hearings over the concentration of media ownership, Bolloré denied any desire to influence politics and minimised his role. “Our interests are not political and not ideological, it is always and only economic,” he said. “I am answering your questions only as an individual. I have no title nor power at Vivendi, Bolloré?.?.?.?and even less at Lagardère.”

One banker marvels at the performance: “He advances wearing a mask?.?.?.?There is an 18th-century aspect to him: I will strangle you but with a form of grace and elegance.” The most emblematic example of Bolloré’s rightwing media push came when Vivendi gutted the staff of 24-hour news channel i-Télé in 2016. It was rebranded as CNews, a Fox News-like outlet that has since become an incubator for rightwing personalities, including the 2022 presidential hopeful Éric Zemmour. Lejeune has also appeared on the station frequently. In 2021, stars from CNews were parachuted into Lagardère’s Europe 1 radio station after Vivendi built up its Lagardère stake to more than 40 per cent. CNews also bears traces of Bolloré’s faith, notably a Sunday show called In Search of Spirituality. “The assignment Vincent Bolloré gave me was to bring spirituality back to the TV screen,” host Aymeric Pourbaix told La Croix magazine in 2021. 

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