“You cannot be a follower of liberalism and refuse it for yourself,” replies the president of Arcom to BFMTV

The RMC-BFM group channel will move from channel 15 to channel 13 in June. “It remains the leader of the continuous news channels and is ahead by two numbers”, argued the head of the regulatory authority of audiovisual.

“You cannot be a follower of liberalism and refuse it for yourself”, tackled Tuesday January 14 Roch-Olivier Maistre, president of Arcom, guest of the Médias en Seine festival, organized at the Maison de la Radio et de la Musique, while the RMC-BFM group deplored the decision of the regulator of the audiovisual to change the numbering of TNT channels including those of BFMTV. The RMC-BFM group channel will move from channel 15 to channel 13 in June. The four news channels will be grouped between frequencies 13 and 16 in the same order as currently, BFMTV, CNews, LCI and Franceinfo TV.

BFMTV “is not penalized at all, it remains at the head of the continuous news channels and is ahead by two numbers”, assured the boss of Arcom, for whom “public interest and pluralism favored this solution.” “For the viewer, it will be much more comfortable to be able to scroll through all the news channels from 13 to 16,” added Roch-Olivier Maistre. “We favored pluralism by allowing viewers to have access to a simple, fluid, comparative information offering between the four news channels,” he insisted.

In the eyes of the president of the RMC-BFM group, Nicolas de Tavernost, the change in channel numbering “will upset viewers”. He regretted on Franceinfo not having been consulted by Arcom. “What we fear is that the TNT platform will suffer very significant consequences from this upheaval. The TNT platform does not like upheavals,” he declared.