The Commentary Industry, or How the French TV News Killed Itself

A few months ago I already wrote about that compulsive “Do you condemn it?” that rots the TV panels. The tic of the prosecutor in a suit who demands his little ritual condemnation before moving on to the weather. But that was only the tip of a far broader iceberg: the sheer, simple disappearance of factual television news in France.

Let’s put the question bluntly: do you know, in 2026, a single French news broadcast that simply reports the news without sticking on its “in-house expert,” its special correspondent on the sidewalk, its on-call editorialist, its head of the Whatsit department, and its political guest of the moment? The answer: no. The format has been gutted from the inside, methodically, over three decades, and no one seems troubled by it anymore.

The permanent expert, that omniscient NPC

You know them. They’re the same faces as twenty years ago. In the morning, they explain Ukraine to us; in the evening, the Sahel; the next day, Taiwan. Yesterday taxation, today pensions, tomorrow the climate. They know everything about everything, everywhere, all the time. What ought to spark at least a flicker of methodological suspicion in the viewer no longer prompts any reaction at all. Omniscience has become a profession.

These people are not journalists. They are not researchers. Most of the time they have no verifiable expertise whatsoever on the subject of the day. They are there to produce discourse on the cheap, telegenic plausibility, filler between two ad breaks. Their function isn’t to inform, it’s to reassure: as long as some fellow in a suit asserts with aplomb that “the situation is complex,” the viewer gets the impression of having learned something.

The device, for that matter, isn’t unique to television. On X and LinkedIn, the self-proclaimed prophets and their phantom expertise that I described when writing about French-language AI belong to exactly the same attention funnel. Television simply has a twenty-year head start in industrializing the process.

The “head of the World department” and other bogus job titles

Posted in front of a spinning globe backdrop, he reels off talking points lifted from the morning’s AFP wires. He hasn’t set foot abroad in three years. He speaks none of the languages of the countries he comments on. But he holds the title. He has the press card. He has the grave voice. So he knows.

The word writer no longer sufficed: they had to invent service chief, cluster lead, department director, senior editorialist. A bureaucracy of pomp, modeled on the org charts of the private sector, to make it look as though there’s work behind it all. There isn’t. There’s a chair, a teleprompter, and a salary to justify.

All of this unfolds, incidentally, under the benevolent eye of ARCOM, the regulator supposedly meant to safeguard pluralism and which has morphed into an ideological watchman in the service of the dominant thinking. Control of the pomp is guaranteed on every floor. Pluralism zero, conformism maximal, the administrative authority satisfied.

The special correspondent on the sidewalk: the height of emptiness

Here we reach the sublime. The anchor, in Paris, launches gravely: “We now go to our special correspondent in Tel Aviv.” Cut. Up pops a fellow in front of a closed police station, at 10 p.m. local time, wearing a beige vest he probably bought at the airport before leaving. He recites a text written for him in Paris, based on wires that could just as easily have been read in the studio. Three minutes later, he hands back to the studio. The tally: a trip billed at several thousand euros to produce what an intern in Paris would have done in ten minutes.

All of it to mimic journalism. To put on display an act of fieldwork that never took place. To tell the viewer: look, we made the trip, so this is serious. It’s a staging, not a report. The set changes, the emptiness remains.

The 8:05 p.m. political guest: the final contamination

This is probably the worst of the drifts. The news broadcast, in the classic sense, runs twenty or twenty-five minutes. Yet France 2 and TF1 serve up fifty minutes of airtime. How to fill it? You invite a politician. You question him. You ask the ritual question. You let the in-house editorialist “react.” You’ve done filler while convincing yourself you’ve done journalism.

The viewer, for his part, asked for none of it. He wanted to know what had happened during the day. Instead, he gets the indignation segment, the emotion segment, the condescending pedagogy segment, and the political-column segment. Raw information has been drowned in the sauce of commentary.

Remember the great “contributions or taxes” debate that saturated the panels in late 2025, as if the semantic nature of the mandatory levy would change anything at all about the taxpayer’s purchasing power. The debate is held, the commentary thrives, the information stagnates. Mission accomplished.

The deep cause: accounting, not ideology

One might be tempted to see a political conspiracy in this. It’s more mundane, and more depressing. An international report, outside a major crisis, costs several tens of thousands of euros per story. A panel with two guests costs the price of two taxis and three coffees. Over an annual schedule, the math does itself. Commentary replaced fieldwork for purely accounting reasons. The ideology, the bias, the conformism, all of that comes afterward, like an inevitability grafted onto a failing business model.

It’s the same logic that killed the regional print press, that gnaws at web newsrooms, that turns foreign correspondents into underpaid interns in Beirut or Kyiv. The slide is an old one. Today it’s accelerating under the effect of artificial intelligence devouring the media from below, while the television channels convince themselves they still have time to react. They don’t anymore. The market has ruled.

The myth of the golden age

Before anyone accuses me of nostalgia, let’s be clear: the news broadcast of 1985 was no model. It was the post-ORTF era, barely weaned off Gaullist control, of presidential interviews that looked like audiences with a monarch, of the anchor bowing before political power. It was that era that gave birth, a few years later, to PPDA’s fake interview of Fidel Castro, fabricated from archive footage to dress up a conversation that had never taken place. It was also the era when star anchors dined out with the very people they would question the next morning. The ethics of the time, seen in hindsight, were a sorry sight.

What has changed, then, isn’t the quality of the journalism. It’s its servitude. French television news traded institutional submission for market submission. Yesterday, the anchor served power; today, he serves the ratings. Yesterday, silence covered up affairs of state; today, noise drowns them under commentary. The public, for its part, has remained the great absentee from the calculation.

And this is precisely where a dose of lucidity about that public has to be introduced. Because the chatty, hysterical news broadcast didn’t impose itself against demand. It imposed itself with it. Air a twelve-minute report at 8 p.m. on the geopolitics of water in Central Asia: the audience curves drop off within the first minute. Serve up instead a controversy over some outrageous statement by Senator Whatsit, or a face-off between two editorialists trading insults: the curves climb back. The clash pays, substance bores, indignation builds loyalty. The channels didn’t invent this mechanism: they did their job as an industry by following the slope the market pointed them down.

This doesn’t absolve the newsrooms, which could have resisted, elevated, chosen the difficult over the profitable. They chose the profitable. But the notion that the public is pure, demanding, ignored by arrogant journalistic elites, is a comfortable fiction. The viewer consumes what he claims to detest. It’s more mundane than a conspiracy, and more unsettling.

The refuge

A few islands remain. Arte Journal at 7:45 p.m., short format, little editorializing, a genuine international dimension. M6’s 19.45, dry, factual, with no high mass. Euronews’s No Comment, which pushes the logic to its extreme: images, no commentary, nothing else. And then radio, still. France Info, RTL, Europe 1 in their morning slots. Radio holds up better because it doesn’t have to produce a staging: the voice is enough, the decorum is pointless.

All the rest, BFM, CNews, LCI, Franceinfo TV, the 8 p.m. on TF1 and France 2, the late-evening magazine shows, has tipped over. Not into dishonesty, into industrial mediocrity.

Informing no longer pays, commenting does

French television news has abandoned its mission, and no one noticed, because no one really watches it. The audience figures have been falling for twenty years. The under-forties get their information elsewhere, through social networks, through podcasts, through foreign sites. Linear TV sinks deeper into its own emptiness, convinced the problem comes from the public and not from itself.

And meanwhile, the Alloncle report proposes a billion euros of savings on public broadcasting without ever asking the only question worth asking: why has this public service stopped being one? The answer, no one wants to hear. The fourth estate has morphed into the first censor, and this shipwreck is consented to by the very people who make their living from it.

The journalist of 1985 took the plane; he also took his orders. The one of 2026 takes neither: he takes the floor. Institutional servitude yesterday, market servitude today. At no point, in this whole story, was the viewer the objective. And he still isn’t.