French broadcaster BFMTV suspends presenter amid disinformation scandal
France’s most-watched news channel, the 24-hour
BFMTV, has suspended one of its longest-serving presenters and launched
an internal investigation into news packages linked to an Israeli
disinformation unit calling itself “Team Jorge”.
Rachid
M’Barki, an anchor at BFMTV since its launch in 2005, is on leave and
at the centre of the inquiry into multiple stories broadcast on his
show, Le journal de la nuit.
He
was suspended last month, after a member of Team Jorge suggested to
undercover reporters that the group was secretly behind a BFMTV news
report about the Monaco yachting industry.
The
report, broadcast last year, suggested sanctions imposed against Russian
oligarchs were damaging the yachting industry in the Mediterranean
principality.
When a reporter approached BFMTV
to ask questions about the integrity of that package and several others
broadcast by the channel, M’Barki was suspended.
The channels said in a statement that the packages did not go through the usual editorial validation procedures.
Team
Jorge sells hacking and disinformation services to political and
corporate clients who want to conduct covert influence-peddling
campaigns. The team was exposed by the Guardian and an international
consortium of reporters led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories.
The leader of the unit, Tal Hanan, a former
Israeli special forces operative who uses the alias “Jorge”, was filmed
boasting about his ability to manipulate the media to spread propaganda,
by undercover reporters posing as potential clients.
In
one secretly filmed meeting, Hanan told the reporters he was able to
have stories broadcast in France and then played a video clip.
One
of the undercover reporters – Frédéric Métézeau, a Middle East
correspondent at Radio France – recognised the clip as a report by
M’Barki broadcast on BFMTV and approached the channel about the
integrity of the package last month.
Alarm
about the broadcasts escalated rapidly, leading to an internal
investigation, and on 11 January M’Barki was taken off air and put on
leave.
It is not clear whether Team Jorge was
behind the BFMTV news package and, if so, how they planted the stories
and on behalf of whom. The news website Politico, which first reported on the internal investigation at BFMTV, said a dozen suspicious broadcast packages were now under investigation.
BFMTV confirmed the investigation in a statement
on 2 February, saying: “An internal investigation has been ongoing at
BFMTV for two weeks after the discovery of content broadcast on our
programme, Le journal de la nuit, outside the usual validation channels.
The journalist in charge of Journal de la nuit has been suspended since
the opening of this investigation.”
Marc-Olivier
Fogiel, the chief executive of BFMTV, told the Forbidden Stories
consortium: “At this stage, we remain cautious. But the fact remains
that we are victims.”
In a statement, BFMTV’s
society of journalists (SDJ), which seeks to defend the integrity of
reporting, said it had “become aware of suspicions of interference
concerning a journalist from our channel”. The statement said if the
details reported were correct, “they are serious and reprehensible”, and
the SDJ added that it hoped the internal investigation would get to the
bottom of how the packages came to be broadcast.
In
a comment to Politico, M’Barki denied any intentional misconduct. He
said: “They were all real and verified. I do my job … I’m not ruling
anything out, maybe I was tricked, I didn’t feel like I was or that I
was participating in an operation of I don’t know what or I wouldn’t
have done it.”
Tal Hanan, the head of Team
Jorge, did not respond to detailed questions about the unit’s activities
and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
