When the dialogue does not pass, there remain the letters, which make it possible to explain the subjects which annoy. We wrote to each other a lot last week on Radio France Internationale, the radio station of France Médias Monde (RFI, France 24, MCD). However, these exchanges have not yet made it possible to appease the grievances that many employees have vis-à-vis their management. This, they consider, underestimates the requirement for clarity and respect for the ethical rules supposed to apply to everyone in the company, which they have been demanding acutely for several weeks.
At the origin of the protest: an interview carried out by an in-house journalist based in Cameroon, at the end of November 2021, which the management was slow to condemn. At the time, the journalist Alain Foka had broadcast, on his own YouTube channel (but in front of microphones with RFI and France 24 logos), the comments of a guest denigrating the work of a colleague; in a survey called “Congo Hold Up”, carried out within a consortium of nineteen international media, Sonia Rolley had just participated in the revelation of the existence of embezzlement of public funds in the Congo.
At first, the management had described the work of the youtuber journalist as“irreproachable”, without providing explicit support to Sonia Rolley – support of which the investigator still considers herself deprived.
The management of RFI had described the work of the youtuber journalist Alain Foka as “irreproachable”, without providing explicit support to Sonia Rolley
The excitement that this response aroused turned into a motion of no confidence, submitted on Tuesday 1er February to the vote of the employees. “Do you trust the management of RFI to apply and enforce the ethical principles that govern all media, to defend and promote free and independent information? », they were asked. 67.1% of voters (55% participation out of a college of 524 people) answered no.
A warning shot whose direction did not seem to immediately take full measure. In the communication she sent immediately after, she “did not even take note of the result of the motion”, regrets Marie Normand, the president of the Society of Journalists. The collective of a hundred journalists behind the motion therefore resolved to send a new message, on February 2, by the SNJ-CGT: “contempt and denial of reality cannot remain a mode of management, they wrote among others. Communication work will not be enough to quell this crisis”. The new answer that followed finally evoked (but without quoting the incriminated person) a ” malpractice “ followed by a summons and a sanction.
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