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Comment by Foobar8568 | Hacker News Reader

French media are owned by his literal relatives, one (Bouygues, owner of the largest French /media? With TF1 etc.) being the witness of one of his wedding and godfather of his son Louis. The other son is married to the heir of Darty/FNAC. I don't remember where Dassault (major newspaper owner) fits but they were both close as well.

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Pierre Fabre (big pharma) associated with the Dassault family used to have a big share in Valmonde, the owner of Valeurs Actuelles, and Olivier Dassault was for a time the lead editorialist (lead op-ed writer). Valeurs Actuelles used to be very traditionally conservative (vaguely associated with a conservative rural party) in the 1970s, then moderate right-of-center.

Olivier Dassault turned it into one of the main supports of Nicolas Sarkozy starting 2005 or 2006 for his successful presidency campaign in 2007 until 2014.

After the Sarkozy and Hollande eras Valeurs Actuelles turned far-right. Eric Zemmour, a publicist-turned-politician, used to write for Valeurs Actuelles. It is financially in the hands of the French-Lebanese Safa family.

I used to read their monthly magazine "Le Spectacle du Monde" which was at the time much less political. It is now independent, headed by an elderly diplomat and collaborator to former president Jacques Chirac.

Ragrding Sarkozy, you also forgot his close relationships with the late Lagardère father (biggest French media mogul in the 1990s) and with André Bettencourt and his window (L'Oréal, richest person in France in the 2000s). Despite his being in jail, Sarkozy remains administrator of the Lagardère trust.

Dassault (major newspaper owner)

Is that like Lockheed Martin owning a major newspaper or GE owning a TV network?

Or SpaceX owning Twitter, or the president owning Truth Social?

Or Amazon owning the Washington Post.

Or journalists everywhere shaping stories to their own biases.

almost like ... journalistic integrity and ... maybe less monopoly ... are good things

that is not the same.

Sure they are. They’re both just people using whatever power they have to shape the narrative.

on the one hand you have the owner dictating his political bias to all his employees/journalists. on the other hand you have a person/journalist interpreting reality through their own political bias. what's the difference? in the first case the medium would only report biased in one direction, in the second case it'd report roughly split around the percentages of the (journalistic) population, e.g. 60% this, 40% that.

Amazon doesn't own the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos does. I'm not sure if this makes the situation worse or better.

> GE owning a TV network

Ever watched any NBC IP in the 2000s and early 2010s?

  > > GE owning a TV network
  > Ever watched any NBC IP in the 2000s and early 2010s?

Sure, recalling 30Rock's continual references to it brought it to mind as a relatively politically neutral US equivalent. Granting the limits of my TV consumption, NBC's IP never evoked thoughts of purchasing a nuclear sub or jet engine.

It's actually kind of worse. Because you get a mix of Dassault (the company)'s agenda (defense spending, pro-industry) and a push for the fairly conservative views of the Marcel Bloch/Dassault descendants themselves.

To be fair, le Figaro was The French conservative newspaper long before the Dassault's ownership (like +100 years prior), so it's more a case of "Le Figaro has a more comfortable budget to push its views".

The closest I can think of in the US context is Bezos owning the Washington Post to both push his personal views and Amazon's interests.

Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).

> Or maybe lately, Larry Ellison's take over of Paramount/CBS (but it feels more like he is buying a toy for his son).

If it were just a toy for his son these things wouldn't have happened - Stephen Colbert canned - Bari Weiss hired to head the news division - $32 million settlement for an easily winnable lawsuit

I've probably missed some. Ellison is a huge Trump supporter and is clearly reshaping CBS to at least go easy on Trump, if not to make it yet another right wing propaganda outlet.

$32 million settlement for a lawsuit *they had already won*. They were supposedly “settling” with Trump so that he wouldn't refile it.

It was a straight-up bribe.

Or Musk, who heads a few businesses that directly benefit from government contracts, including some in the defense sector, owning one of the largest online media platforms (fka Twitter).

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