Lhe scandal broke out on Sunday March 21 at the end of the afternoon, with the broadcast of Marie Portolano’s documentary, I’m a journalist, I’m not a bitch devoted to sexism in sports journalism. Or, more exactly, with its censored version. Because the pundits of the encrypted channel, the sports service in the lead, have seen fit to cut the scenes implicating one of its star presenters, Pierre Ménès. Exit, therefore, Pierre Ménès lifting a skirt on the air, Pierre Ménès kissing a journalist, the same gallanting a columnist …
The famous “Canal spirit” inherited from the 1980s and 1990s, made up of freedom and “trashitude”, has in reality never ceased to come up against the successive wishes of shareholders to bring them into line.
So many sexual assaults which, for a long time, will not have earned any sanction for the columnist of the “Canal Football Club”, it is true very close to Yannick Bolloré, the son of Vincent Bolloré, majority shareholder of Vivendi, to which the Canal + group belongs. Following the revelations of Marie Portolano, Pierre Menès was finally suspended for a “Undetermined time” by the channel, announced Sandrine Cassini in The world March 30.
This is not the first time that freedom of expression has been undermined by the management of the encrypted channel. The famous “Canal spirit” inherited from the 1980s and 1990s, made up of freedom and “trashitude”, has in reality never ceased to come up against the successive wishes of shareholders to bring them into line.
An applauded launch
The world is at the forefront when the pay channel is worn on the baptismal font. In the early 1980s, the PAF only had three public channels. François Mitterrand was persuaded to unlock television by breaking the sacrosanct state monopoly. It was Havas, and more particularly André Rousselet, the former director of the Elysée’s cabinet, that in 1983 fell in charge of launching this new channel.
For Havas, the pay-TV model created by HBO in the United States can be transposed to France. On November 5, 1984, on the eve of the channel’s launch, journalist Jean-François Lacan congratulated himself in the daily: “Canal + has held its first bet and it bothers a lot of people: those who only believe in public service and rebel against a television set reserved for a few; those who swear by private television and denounce, behind Havas, state control; those who protest against the nightly broadcasting of erotic films; those who would have preferred a cultural or educational channel ”.
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