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PARIS - Can the French touch make a difference?
France 24, the latest entrant in the crowded global market for round-the-clock television news, is betting its future on the idea.
Hot on the heels of the mega-buck launch of al-Jazeera's English-language service last month, and in a market
already dominated by CNN and the BBC, France 24 is due to start broadcasting tomorrow.
It will first be available via streaming on the internet, and from Friday via satellite across Europe, Asia and the Middle East and by cable to viewers on the American east coast.
It will have a French channel that will broadcast around the clock and an English channel that will switch over to French for six hours a day and eventually give time to Arabic.
France 24 finds its roots in remarks President Jacques Chirac made in November 2002, when, at a key moment in the buildup to the Iraq War, he made a pitch for a news channel that would provide an alternative voice to the British or American viewpoints.
"We must set the goal of launching a major, continuous news channel in French, equal to the BBC or CNN for anglophones. It's essential for the influence of our country. And for expatriates, it would be a living, immediate link with France," he said.
Chirac's idea has now given birth to an odd and rather hybrid creation - a joint venture between TF1 and France Televisions, which are the country's biggest commercial and state television networks.
France 24 president Alain de Pouzilhac says the new 24/7 channel will be independent and strive to win minds by giving a view of the world "through French eyes" and with "French values".
He defines this as having a perspective that is open and diverse; strong on debate and analysis; and with a keen interest in culture and lifestyle.
"This is the television that President Chirac wanted, but it is not Chirac TV," insists de Pouzilhac, a former advertising executive.
France is famously prickly for defending French, but with France 24 realises that it must broadcast in a broad mix of other languages to get maximum coverage.
A bigger question, though, is whether France 24 has the clout to push its way into this crowded market.
Funding for France 24 will come from Government coffers: €16 million ($30.9 million) for this year and €70 million for next year.
The company will provide some of its own input, supplemented by news, photo and video feeds from news agency Agence France-Presse and the state-run Radio France Internationale. It says it will able to reach 80 million households, or 190 million people, in more than 90 countries.
To that end, France 24 has hired 380 people, including 170 journalists, who have been rehearsing at its headquarters, on the southwestern rim of Paris, with English- and French-language teams that will work together to produce identical bulletins.
So if size matters in this business, France 24 is at a big disadvantage. CNN, founded in 1980, has 20 bureaux outside the United States, staff of 4000 and a budget of US$1.6 billion ($2.3 billion). BBC World, launched in 1991, has 58 bureaux and 250 correspondents, as well as the resources of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) at its disposal, and a budget of £4.2 billion ($120 billion).
In the buildup to the Iraq war, and in the first months of the offensive, many in the British and US media reported in a gung-ho style, sometimes deriding France as cowardly for opposing the conflict.
Journalists in France, though, were generally cautious about Washington and London's claims about weapons of mass destruction.
So the notion of a different perspective from the monolithic "Anglo-Saxon" view, which would also ferret out news from other sources, is highly alluring, and not just to the French.
But in France itself, the question being asked is whether France 24 can prove its independence, given that the Government is financing it and next year is election year, when all sorts of muck-raking and scandals are likely to erupt.