The Franco-Palestinian activist Rima Hassan, who grew up in Niort, in Deux-Sèvres, and was recently elected European deputy for La France insoumise, denounced, on Tuesday October 8, 2024 at the opening of an interview she granted live on BFMTV, the editorial line of this continuous news television channel around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, since the October 7 attack perpetrated by Hamas.
Rima Hassan recalled that, two days earlier, BFMTV had been “congratulated by the spokesperson for the Israeli army, a genocidal army”, in this case Olivier Rafowicz. The latter declared: “Your channel does an excellent job of presenting the conflict.” “Unpublished” in the eyes of Rima Hassan.
The “focus” of BFMTV
The presenters of the show BFM Story, Alain Marshall and Olivier Truchot, cut short the exchange because the elected “called into question the work of an editorial staff”, remarks that they judged “unacceptable” : the sequence, a little over two minutes long and taking the form of a dialogue of the deaf, is visible on the Internet.
In a press release in the form of “focus” broadcast immediately, the management of BFMTV “would like to recall the rigorous, impartial and balanced work of its editorial staff, as evidenced by the deployment on the ground of seven teams in Israel and Lebanon, and the distribution on Friday and Sunday evening of an exceptional document produced by BFMTV thanks to Palestinian journalists in Gaza. A document contested live on Sunday evening by the spokesperson for the Israeli army during this interview to which Rima Hassan referred. » The society of journalists of this same channel also “deplored” the intervention of the MEP.
