France’s Conservative Channel CNews Ordered to Comply With Pluralism Rules

Defenders of the billionaire-owned channel, often compared to Fox News, call the decision a state intrusion into a private outlet’s editorial independence.

Television screen view showing journalist and host Pascal Praud on the CNews news channel during a studio broadcast in Paris, Ile de France, France, March 2, 2026. Isabelle Souriment / Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

France’s media regulator on Monday ordered CNews, a rolling news channel often compared to Fox News in the United States, to comply with new pluralism rules, bringing the conservative outlet owned by billionaire Vincent Bolloré a final step short of disciplinary action.

The channel’s defenders describe the decision as a dangerous state intrusion into the editorial independence of a private outlet, and accuse their ideological opponents of stifling free speech and threatening press freedom and democracy. Its critics counter that the channel was long overdue for regulation.

The Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority, known as Arcom, adopted the formal notice on June 12 and published it on June 15. It is the first time the regulator has applied its expanded pluralism standard to a broadcaster.

CNews vowed to fight the decision. In a statement it emailed to The Epoch Times, the channel said it scrupulously respects its pluralism obligations and accused Arcom of an “excessively restrictive” reading of the editorial freedom that media enjoy in a democracy. The channel said it would appeal to the Council of State, France’s top administrative court, and, if needed, to the relevant European courts.

A formal notice is not itself a penalty, but a further breach could open a sanctions procedure that may end in fines, the suspension of advertising or, ultimately, the loss of the broadcasting license.

CNews Defenders See Free Speech at Risk

“France is not a free country,” Gilles-William Goldnadel, a French lawyer, president of the NGO Lawyers Without Borders, and a commentator on CNews, told The Epoch Times, adding that he “was weighing each of these words.”

He argued that the French media landscape, and public broadcasting in particular, is dominated by the left and far-left, and that CNews is the only channel to address subjects such as immigration and crime through an objective lens.

“Without platforms such as X and channels like CNews, French media outlets adept at concealment would prevent us from knowing what is going on. That is why they are hated by the left,” he said.

In comments to The Epoch Times, Arcom said the broader pluralism duty stems from a 2024 ruling by the Council of State. The obligation, it said, goes beyond counting politicians’ speaking time and requires a more qualitative assessment of what is expressed on air by all participants.

Critics of the ruling focus on the standard itself, calling the new duty inherently subjective and a threat to editorial freedom. Politicians, journalists, and lawyers on the conservative side in France have long argued that the Council of State, like Arcom, favors the left and discriminates against the right.

Arcom rejects that reading. In a written note sent to The Epoch Times in response to accusations of bias, Arcom President Martin Ajdari said the authority’s decisions target a channel’s failure to maintain “control of the airwaves,” not the speech of individual guests, and do not restrict their freedom of expression.

He said the regulator acts on outside complaints rather than monitoring every channel around the clock, and noted that it is “regularly accused of censorship or, conversely, of passivity, and often of both at once.”

In March 2026, 57 academics filed an “emergency appeal” before the Council of State, asking it to compel the regulator to enforce pluralism on CNews and accusing Arcom of “deliberate negligence” in its duties.

The Complaint Behind the Decision

For this decision, Arcom acted on a January 2026 complaint from Reporters Without Borders and reviewed 168 hours of CNews programming from March 2025. It concluded that the coverage showed a “manifest and durable imbalance” in the expression of currents of thought and opinion, citing recurring themes such as security, immigration, and the far-left party France Unbowed.

Arcom’s decision to act on a complaint from Reporters Without Borders has stirred controversy.

“I revealed years ago that this NGO’s president, Pierre Haski, had financial ties to George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Nothing more, nothing less. And it is this NGO’s complaint that Arcom welcomed,” Goldnadel said.

In 2018, Haski publicly stated that he had been financed by the Open Society Foundation to conduct “a web surveillance operation” during the 2017 French presidential campaign.

Claude Chollet, president of the French Journalism Observatory, argued that Reporters Without Borders “started with an excellent mission: defending free speech and protecting journalists around the world.”

“There are countries such as China, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran where journalists are imprisoned simply for doing their jobs. Defending them is an admirable cause,” he told The Epoch Times, adding: “But after its former president Robert Ménard left, it became the opposite: a far-left, pro-censorship organization.”

The organization rejected suggestions that its work is politically directed and denounced attacks from the “far-right” and “reactionaries” aimed at discrediting it and undermining press freedom. Haski, for his part, defended himself, saying he “did not violate any ethical rules by taking part in this project aimed at defending democracy in France.”

Sanctions

CNews has been the French news channel most heavily targeted by Arcom sanctions since Bolloré relaunched i-Télé as CNews in 2017. Since 2019, the channel has been penalized 26 times, for a total of more than 630,000 euros in fines. C8, the group’s entertainment channel, accumulated more than 7.5 million euros in penalties before it was closed by Arcom.

The channel has repeatedly been fined for coverage that Arcom judged problematic. In January 2024, the regulator fined CNews 50,000 euros over a segment in which France was described as the least safe country in Europe. The figures came from Numbeo, a database compiled from its users rather than from official statistics or a representative sample. Arcom deemed that the channel should not have presented the ranking as established fact.

However, Eurostat data place France among the higher-ranked European countries for several categories of police-recorded violent crime, notably assaults and sexual offences. Surveys show a large majority of the public is convinced that safety is declining: 89 percent of respondents to Ipsos’s 2024 “Fractures françaises” study said violence in society was intensifying, and an IFOP-Fiducial poll the same year found 85 percent who believed delinquency had risen.

In July 2024, Arcom fined the channel 20,000 euros after a guest disputed human-caused climate change without being contradicted on air. In November 2024, it imposed a 100,000-euro fine over a broadcast that described abortion as a leading cause of death worldwide; the regulator held that abortion could not be presented as a cause of mortality, stating that a fetus is not legally a person.

C8, the most heavily fined channel in France, was denied renewal of its digital terrestrial slot in July 2024 and stopped broadcasting at the end of February 2025, the first time the regulator had taken a channel off the air. The left broadly hailed the decision. Figures on the French right cast the decision as evidence that ideology, not regulation alone, was at work.

A Double Standard, Conservatives Say

Conservative critics contrast the treatment of CNews with that of public broadcasters. A French parliamentary report on public broadcasting, published in April 2026, concluded that France’s state media had committed “repeated breaches of its obligation to provide honest information,” “serious violations of basic journalistic ethics,” and a “persistent under-representation” of right-wing parties, particularly the National Rally, on its channels.

On June 11, Arcom put Radio France on notice over the under-representation of the National Rally on France Inter and France Info, where much of the party’s airtime had been confined to overnight slots, and it reprimanded France Télévisions on June 12.

For Chollet, however, this represents an “obvious” show of bias from Arcom.

“It has long been known that public broadcasting in France discriminates against the main opposition,” he said.

“After this parliamentary report, Arcom had no choice but to issue a warning to Radio France and France Télévisions. Had it not done so, the regulator’s subsequent move against CNews, threatening the channel’s very existence, would have been a public scandal.”

Ajdari said the same pluralism rules apply to all national news channels, and that drawing criticism from both sides may, in his view, be a sign of balance.

For conservatives, this is a sign that Arcom does not give the radical left everything it wants, which lets the regulator appear impartial even as its decisions favor the left. Goldnadel sees the clearest sign of Arcom’s partiality in the fact that when the regulator occasionally faulted public broadcasters, it issued warnings rather than fines, while private broadcasters were fined millions, a difference he likened to “day and night.”

The dispute comes at a sensitive moment. In 2025, CNews became France’s most-watched rolling news channel, and the country is now less than a year away from a presidential election.