Foreign Perspectives

What is it? Well, it’s the French response to CNN and BBC World ie it’s a 24 hour French news channel. The thinking seems to be that the anglophones have had it too easy for far too long and it was high time that the French view on world affairs received a wider audience.

Initially, it was to be primarily a French language channel but seeing as the objective was to spread France’s world view to a wider audience, they bit the bullet and it will initially be offered with French and English on equal footing. Knowing that France often sees the English language as “the enemy”, I’m sure that was a far from easy decision to take but it just goes to show how seriously they are about getting this channel onto a the world stage.

At the moment they’re supposed to be starting broadcasting towards the end of the year but that date will probably slip.

One thing that we’ve noticed here is that the world seems a whole lot more violent in French than it is in English which is a side-effect of France concentrating more on their ex-colonies which are mainly in fairly violent African countries. It’ll be interesting to see if this view is reflected in the English version of France 24.