When, on 1er February, Ivan Rioufol said on CNews that the Warsaw Ghetto, “It was first a hygienist place”, “a place that was made to preserve typhus”no one on the set of Pascal Praud’s program “L’heure des pros” had found a way to react to the comments of the editorialist of the Figaro. On social networks, on the other hand, he had caused indignation (Bernard-Henri Lévy, Anne Hidalgo, SOS Racisme, the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, etc.). After examining the sequence, the Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication (Arcom) decided on May 10 to put the channel on notice twice, for two different reasons. This decision was published in Official newspaper of May 20.
First, for the regulatory body, CNews was guilty of a breach of “the obligation of honesty and rigor in the presentation and processing of information”, to which it is bound by its agreement (the regulatory text that binds it). In its decision, Arcom recalls that“there is a consensus within the scientific community to consider that the health reasons put forward by Nazi Germany to justify the creation of the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940 were a pretext aimed at regrouping Jews, the first stage of their extermination”.
In reaction to the storm of tweets that the sequence had aroused, Ivan Rioufol had reacted on the social network: “For my lynchers, I repeat: Nazi hygienism served as a pretext for the segregation of the Jews, their massacre and the worst of totalitarianism. I will not allow myself to be insulted by counterfeiters and fools. »
A sanction procedure in the event of a repeat offense
Moreover, since, that day, neither the presenter of “L’heure des pros” nor any of the guests gathered on the set reacted to this remark likely to be qualified as revisionist, the authority chaired by Roch -Olivier Maistre estimates the “failure to control the antenna” characterized, hence the second formal notice. In the event of a repeat offense on the same grounds of law – “control of the antenna” and “breach of honesty of information” –CNews exposes itself to the opening of a sanction procedure which may go as far as the payment of a fine, a suspension of service, of a program or of an advertising slot, or even a reduction in the duration of its permission to issue.
However, it turns out that during the plenary meeting of May 10, Arcom looked at another sequence broadcast by CNews. This time, on November 21, 2021, in the program “Les Points sur les i”, presented by Thomas Lequertier, it was the reality of the fifth wave of Covid-19 contamination which was, in particular, denied. Gold, “figures from the World Health Organization indicated an increase in the number of new cases in France”, specifies the Arcom. There again, not only the honesty of the information had to suffer from the unbalanced discussion, because insufficiently contradicted and discussed, but Arcom estimates that the antenna was not controlled.
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