Laurent Joffrin announced on Friday September 1 that he would no longer go to CNews, where he was regularly invited to debate, due to the forced redesign of the Sunday Journal (JDD).
In a letter entitled “Why I am leaving CNews”, published Thursday on the website of his media Le Journal, the journalist, marked on the left, explains that he no longer wants to go to the channel owned by the Vivendi group, also the largest shareholder of the Lagardère group. and under whose leadership the brutal overhaul of the weekly took place. “Throughout my professional life, I defended and implemented the idea of ??journalistic and political autonomy for the editorial staff of which I was a member,” recalls the former director of Liberation and the Nouvel Observateur.
Within these two newsrooms, the 71-year-old journalist explains that he participated in the creation of charters guaranteeing “a balanced treatment of information” and that he “submitted five times” during his career to the law. editorial veto.
“All the principles and all the practices that were swept away unceremoniously in the case of the Journal du Dimanche, triggering the hostility of more than 90% of the editors of the weekly, who carried out the longest strike in its history, without succeeding in be heard,” continues the journalist, who launched Le Journal in April.
Historic forty-day strike
“Under these conditions, and for this precise reason, it seems to me incoherent to continue working in a chain directed by the same owner, whose methods I have loudly denounced, on several occasions in this letter, JDD,” he says.
The JDD was shaken by a historic forty-day editorial strike against the appointment at the end of June of Geoffroy Lejeune, former editorial director of Current values ??marked on the far right. Many observers see in this recruitment the hand of Vincent Bolloré, a billionaire with opinions reputed to be ultra-conservative.
Vivendi, Mr. Bolloré’s group owning Canal and its channels (including CNews and C8), is in the process of absorbing Lagardère, owner of JDD, Paris Match and Europe 1, after a successful takeover bid.