France 24 – Fromage…dommage!


MY VERDICT?
I wish France Vingt-Quatre was either more French, or more professional (like AJE).

You’re promised dinner in Paris, but instead get burger and chips on the Champs Élysées.Now available on Sky 515. I’m watching a revoiced package from the French channel on Le Salon du Chocolat. Here’s how the Frenchness manifests itself:

  • On chocolate haute couture creations: “They represent the bringing together of French know-how.”
  • A profile begins: “This France-loving woman is Cesaria Evora.”
  • The weather warns of widespread “inclemency.”

Aside from the pretty dreadful Google translate issues, France 24‘s Anglo version is basically Euronews with cheap anchors and cheap sets interspersed with overly repeated, over-long segments. Correspondent two-ways with Moscow and Beirut feel odd.

Andrea Sanke‘s debate on the Iraq Study Group has some very low wattage guests…she’s ex-CNN (via Germany and London) and may be adequate at link-reading, but on this showing she certainly can’t carry a half-hour debate on foreign policy.

The circular debate set is cold and everyone’s too far apart. Remote guests are cut in horribly. The framing stinks. The audio sucks. It’s a tough watch. Only interesting moment for me was hearing from a French ForPol analyst – when they eventually cut his mike up. And Andrea crashes out into a commercial break. I’m guessing the gallery crew don’t couper la moutarde either.

And now we’re back again at the Salon du Chocolat. Drawing board. Back. To.

BTW for another opinion, here’s a review from last night.

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3 responses to “France 24 – Fromage…dommage!”

  1. “inclemency” seems to be correct according to my dictionary.

    BTW: I don’t understand your title, is “Fromage” the only French word you know?

  2. Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français…’Inclemency’ is in the dictionary, but it is not in current English usage. The title is a feeble franglais joke.

  3. I don’t find the content as bad as you say, but the IT department at France24 is very clearly run by an absolutely incompetent bunch of wannabes.

    I don’t have TV, so I watch news channels over the internet exclusively. With France24 there are only two kinds of scenarios:

    1 – the video feed freezes after seconds to minutes

    2 – the video feed doesn’t freeze for quite a while but eventually it locks up the browser and often the operating system.

    In case of 1, the only thing one can do to restart the video feed is to reload the site, watch the advertisement yet again, only to see the video feed freeze up after a few seconds to minutes again.

    But the advertisement never has any problems, only the content.

    In case of 2, the only thing one can do is to kill the browser and often one needs to reboot the operating system.

    I tried this on several different computers, different operating systems, different browsers. There is never any difference. I even tried in internet cafes on other people’s hardware. But there is never any difference.

    France24 do not seem to realise how much damage they do to France. Willingly or not, they are representing France on the internet. Their incredibly incompetent content delivery will reflect on France.

    Would you buy any IT related products and services from France if this is the state of the art of French IT ??? I guess not.

    France24 engineers should all be fired and not get any unemployment benefits, never get any work in any technology field again. They should go and work as janitors at McDonalds. Imbeciles !!!