The petition calling for the closure of CNews passes the million signature mark

Two days before a vote by deputies on the classification without further action or the examination of this request, the petition calling to “remove CNews from French broadcasting” continues to gain momentum. It actually exceeded one million signatures on Sunday.

The petition on the National Assembly website, which compares CNews to “a propaganda machine” or to the American channel Fox News, was launched in June by an individual and took off after the racist attack in Trappes on October 23, reaching 500,000 signatures last Monday. The passing of this threshold triggered a meeting last Tuesday of the office of the Cultural Affairs Committee of the National Assembly, competent on the subject.

The file in the hands of the Assembly

This office will meet again this Tuesday at 1 p.m. to vote either on the dismissal of the petition, or on the organization of a debate in the hemicycle, in accordance with the regulations of the Assembly.

Of the three petitions having previously crossed the required threshold of 500,000 signatures, only the one against the Duplomb law led to a debate in the hemicycle. By the time it closed, it had collected more than two million signatures. The other two were classified: the law committee dismissed in April a petition against the proposed Yadan law on anti-Semitism, judging in particular that a debate would duplicate the examination of the text in Parliament. With this same argument, in July the deputies filed another petition having exceeded 700,000 signatures, against a proposed law establishing a presumption of legitimate use of firearms by the police.

A chain in the fold of Vincent Bolloré

The + Libres union of Canal+, the group to which CNews belongs, deplored “the excesses” of the channel on Friday in a press release. In accordance with the union mission to defend employees, “we accompany and support the CNews teams on a daily basis”, underlined + Libres. But “this support for employees cannot be interpreted as adherence to the chain’s guidelines,” the union clarified. “The current editorial line of CNews corresponds neither to the values ​​that we defend, nor to those that the Canal+ group should, in our opinion, embody,” he added, calling on the group’s management to “take responsibility.”

The channel owned by conservative billionaire Vincent Bolloré is regularly accused of promoting far-right opinions and themes, which it contests by claiming to defend freedom of expression. It has been sanctioned several times by Arcom, the audiovisual regulator.