Why is Sarah Knafo so rarely invited to public media?

When public radio plays “We don't invite those who shine too much”, it leads to political debates as varied as a pizza without toppings!

On December 7, Sarah Knafo – MEP since April 2024 – was questioned by Jean-Jacques Bourdin on Sud Radio. She was remarkable in this interview, in terms of form, argumentation, self-control, in particular when she explained why, unlike Marine Le Pen and the National Rally, she would not have voted the motion of censure. We can completely disagree with her, what she thinks and what she represents, without justifying the rarity of her interventions in the public media (France 5 and France Inter have never contacted her).

State ostracism!

I chose the example of Sarah Knafo but she is accompanied by others in this ostracism that only official campaigns, with their rules, overcome. Éric Zemmour, Jordan Bardella, Philippe de Villiers and Michel Onfray for example, express themselves and dialogue elsewhere but this compensation does not make the abstention of the public media towards them any less unbearable, for them as well. However, irrigated with taxpayers' money, they carry out discrimination which offends a normal conception of pluralism.

I do not want to discuss their hierarchy of social facts and the little space they give to tragedies, misdemeanors and crimes that reveal the deplorable state of France but are the opposite of their vision. hemiplegic.

For the duration of this post, I will put myself in their place and try to understand what, from their point of view, would legitimize the exclusions they make.

It would also be possible to go beyond the political and social field by understanding the cultural and literary register. By being surprised, for example but there would be others, at the fact that an excellent French writer, an outstanding stylist like Thomas Morales, is never invited to Augustin Trapenard, Léa Salamé or other largely promotional public service broadcasts . I don't dare believe that this sidelining could come from the fact that he writes in Talker and expresses his love of the province and his nostalgia for a forgotten or disappeared France!

Strange passivity of Arcom on the absence of pluralism in public service

Returning to the sphere where partialities are the most glaring, what would be the mechanisms prohibiting public media from accomplishing their mission?

Also read, Gilles-William Goldnadel: ABC of wrong-way morality

A totalitarian approach to it, giving them the right of life or death over personalities worthy of being invited? If this temptation exists, it will never be admitted or assumed. In a debate which had caused a lot of noise on what journalism should be, it appeared to me that Frédéric Taddéï had largely won over Patrick Cohen. Journalists have a role of inclusion and not exclusion. As long as the law is respected in the debate.

Nor is it the lack of intelligence, finesse and aptitude for orality which could motivate the public media's refusal towards certain people: in fact Sarah Knafo and those I cited with on the contrary, they seem to me to particularly shine in these arrangements. To the point that I wonder: wouldn't they give an inferiority complex to those who only have the resource to challenge them to believe themselves better?

Would it then be that the public media would consider themselves personally offended by the affirmation of certain convictions, by opinions which would be contrary to their own ideological corpus? If that were the case, it would be serious.

On the one hand, everything that is not prohibited in and by a democracy is therefore validated. On the other hand, what greater legitimacy would public media have to arrogate to themselves the right to censor what a part of society has approved? In what capacity could they project opprobrium and immorality onto what only concerns political contradiction and republican diversity?

The media should honor their obligation of universality instead of denying it. Not to mention the strange passivity of the control body which prefers to attack private excesses rather than sanction incontestable offenses to pluralism.

Whatever the view on all these personalities never approved by the public service, they miss the political debate and condemn it to being unfinished, incomplete, mutilated. A Sarah Knafo or a Michel Onfray who is deliberately left aside by an imperative decree of an oriented media mood, are not replaceable or interchangeable. Citizens, then, are scandalously deprived of it.

Please give me the grace to believe that my revolt would be the same if antagonistic words and intelligences were repudiated on principle.