A great scandal, journalistic and also political, falls on the private television channel BFMTV, the continuous information channel with the most audience in France. One of its veteran presenters, Rachid M’Barki, who has worked at the station since its founding in 2005, has been suspended after it was learned that, without the consent of his superiors, he spread distorted news supplied to him by an obscure Israeli company specializing in disinformation.
In the space presented by M’Barki, brief videos of 40 seconds of news “fabricated” to measure to satisfy clients of Israeli society, whether they were Russian oligarchs or states such as Qatar, Sudan, Cameroon or Morocco, were sneaked. M’Barki, 54, has denied having acted in bad faith and having collected money, although he has admitted “a journalistic error of judgement.”
BFMTV CEO Marc-Olivier Fogiel said yesterday that the network “is a victim of this story.” Taking advantage of his supposed editorial freedom to choose topics based on current events, M’Barki introduced manipulated news at the very last minute, altering the script of the program that had previously received the approval of his superiors. In this way he avoided control.
The scandal has been uncovered thanks to an international investigation that has taken several months, carried out by the Forbidden Stories consortium, made up of 30 media outlets, including Radio France and the newspaper Le Monde.
The society that is at the origin of the disinformation is located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and tries to go unnoticed, but its members present themselves as former members of the Israeli army or intelligence services, experts in financial information, military issues, psychological warfare. and social networks. As discovered by Forbidden Stories, this society, which they call Team Jorge, has already intervened in 33 electoral campaigns in Africa, with great success in influencing their results. They are specialists in creating false profiles on the internet and making news that goes viral. According to what the website of the France Info chain – which belongs to the Radio France group – stated yesterday, in one of the videos that the Israeli society showed its clients, it boasted of having sabotaged numerous elections. This Israeli agency confessed that they excluded US national policy, as well as Russia and Israel, from their sphere of action.
The revelations have dealt a serious blow to the prestige of BFMTV, which is battling with other networks that report 24 hours a day, such as CNews, France Info and LCI. The latter, from the same group as TF1, has specialized in information on the war in Ukraine, with news, chronicles from special envoys and constant discussions with experts.