the editorial staff of - private TV of the two election evenings

Grumbling at - TV where journalists learned that the channel would co-broadcast France 2’s two election evenings on their channel. The organizational and budgetary arguments put forward were not convincing.

Pace of election evening on - TV on June 30 and July 7. The France Télévisions group’s news channel will simply retransmit that of France 2 presented by Anne-Sophie Lapix and Laurent Delahousse. A decision which is not to the taste of the Society of Journalists (SDJ) of the TNT channel, as revealed by the Puremédias site. She made it known internally in an email that Telerama was able to consult : “The - editorial team is alarmed at not broadcasting its own evenings on its antenna. This arbitration, we are told, would have been made for budgetary reasons, out of concern for economy. This choice shocks us. » “To our knowledge, such a configuration has never occurred on the air of - nor, more generally, of any other continuous news channel”, again writes the SDJ.

In a period of unprecedented and intense current events, this decision by the group’s general management is all the more unwelcome as it is part of a global strategy: “It’s one more blow and it has a despairing side,” confides a journalist. Overall, the lack of consideration is singled out; and in the writing a sort of resignation sets in: “We are the small news channel and we remain so. This lack of consideration is tiring,” slips a reporter.

A particular context

On the management side, the story is different. Marc Cantarelli, deputy editorial director, responded – also by email – to the SDJ. “We are not saving money at all,” explains the former editor-in-chief of LCI and BFMTV, who places this choice within an organizational framework: “Each of you must be able to breathe, because we must last over time, he indicates, also recalling that: yes, an election night has a significant cost […] and that it is therefore with full responsibility that we combine our forces with those of France 2 to produce a wonderful election evening, which will allow us to continue the budgetary effort on a daily basis. »

The crisis is brewing at - in an atmosphere already made complicated by the threats hovering over public broadcasting, to which must be added the particular situation of the channel. Despite its ambition translated by a grid refocused around current events and embodied by signatures (Jean-Baptiste Marteau, Émilie Tran Nguyen, Patricia Loison or Lucie Chaumette), - still lags behind in the panorama of news channels with 0.7% audience share, far behind CNews (2 .8%), BFMTV (2.7%) and LCI (1.7%).

She is counting on the Olympic Games to regain her health. With this in mind and to allow everyone to take their leave, management announced in December that it would put in place a lighter schedule from mid-June with co-broadcast or rebroadcast of programs from France 2 and France 3. But the dissolution of the The National Assembly went through this and mobilized the entire editorial staff.

Frustration totale

Another news sequence will follow, just as dense. In the absence of reinforcements, the choice was therefore made to pool resources. The management also argues that six journalists from - will participate in the France 2 election evening. Not enough for the SDJ. “Because, apart from the fact that this election night promises to be one of the most watched of all time, these early legislative elections will undoubtedly go down in history. »

The frustration is total and seems to go well beyond the scope of these two evenings: “Beyond the negative signal sent to the teams who have been extremely involved since the start of this campaign, the absence of displaying our identity on air would convey a deleterious message for our channel: that of its legitimacy,” concludes the SDJ. Enough to discourage even his big signings. Thus Matthieu Belliard, who hosts the weekend slots from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., is preparing to leave - just one year after joining it. The former columnist of C to you will officiate at RMC at the start of the morning of Apolline de Malherbe. Ironically, on June 9 he presented the channel’s European election evening…