"What is surprising is that C8 was allowed to broadcast for so long"

On Friday, February 28 at 11:59 p.m., the C8 television channel, part of the Canal + group owned by Vincent Bolloré, will no longer be able to broadcast on the eighth channel of TNT following a decision by Arcom validated by the Council of State. On Europe 1 and CNews, which belong to the same billionaire, support for the channel largely takes up airtime: they denounce a desire to "silence discordant opinions" , "as in Guinea, as in Libya, as in Russia" . They predict "dark hours" for democracy, because of a left that would like to keep "the monopoly on the story".

These arguments are taken up in the political arena. On the far right – which is losing an echo chamber where it was largely favoured with C8 and Cyril Hanouna's show Touche pas à mon poste – Jordan Bardella, for example, castigated the "ayatollahs of single-track thinking". The right, which had not benefited from the same preferential treatment from the channel, expressed its support through the voices of Bruno Retailleau and Laurent Wauquiez, for whom Arcom "has taken upon itself the right of life or death over this channel".

Alexis Lévrier, a specialist in the press in France, believes that this reallocation of frequency is good news, respectful of democratic rules. He explains why several arguments of C8's defenders do not hold: in his eyes, the protection of freedom of expression imposes constraints that the channel did not want to maintain.