Rumors of political maneuverings have been so thick that late last month an editorial in Le Monde accused the channel’s bosses of “schemings unworthy of a banana republic.”Time takes a skeptical look at Jacques Chirac’s answer to the entire Anglo-Saxon broadcast news media, France 24. The managing editor doesn’t use my favourite word (“weltanschauung“), but he does come up with my number two contender “Manichean”. Anyway, their weltanschauung isn’t very Manichaean, but their budgets are small:

the channel seems hampered more by limited means than by unseemly political influence. It managed to get a team of reporters and producers off to Somalia to cover the war there, but generally has to depend heavily on news agency correspondents or freelancers. There is still an air of improvisation on the set and frequently on the screen, which features more people talking about the news than it does innovative news-gathering.