When you see the BBC's beard being shaved, put yours in a pot to soak.

The UDR party, one of Marine Le Pen's allies, has launched a parliamentary debate on the French public television service, which it accuses of being hostile to the far right. This is beginning to impose the same approach that the most polarized conservative forces have been applying to the BBC, with the aim of weakening and diminishing it. Macron, who has also frequently criticized the BBC, managed to get the Senate to vote in favor of eliminating the specific levy that funded the broadcaster. Le Pen, on the other hand, wants to privatize it outright. In other words, kill it, because the very purpose of public television is to broadcast content of general interest that would be unprofitable if it had to be financed solely by private means.

In this case, the offensive stems from a surreptitiously filmed video showing two journalists from the network having coffee with two members of the Socialist Party. The footage was published by a conservative media outlet and circulated widely in the media outlets controlled by Vincent Bolloré, which lean towards the far right. Both journalists explained that having coffee with politicians is part of their job and that the video was maliciously edited, but that hasn't stopped it from being shown 853 times in two weeks on CNews, Bolloré's all-news channel. The battle for the narrative is significant, and we see how Trumpism and its local manifestations follow the same playbook, which forces those in charge at the CCMA to construct a very strong narrative (while also managing the house well, of course): it's only a matter of time before we start seeing similar smear campaigns, using underhanded tactics, and we'll have to see what role they play. This doesn't mean lowering standards, which must remain extremely high, but it does mean being able to distinguish between a well-founded complaint and wholesale denigration.