France’s most-watched news channel, the 24-hour BFMTV, has suspended one of its longest-serving presenters and launched an internal investigation into news packages linked to an Israeli disinformation unit calling itself “Team Jorge”.
Rachid M’Barki, an anchor at BFMTV since its launch in 2005, is on leave and at the centre of the inquiry into multiple stories broadcast on his show, Le journal de la nuit.
He was suspended last month, after a member of Team Jorge suggested to undercover reporters that the group was secretly behind a BFMTV news report about the Monaco yachting industry.
The report, broadcast last year, suggested sanctions imposed against Russian oligarchs were damaging the yachting industry in the Mediterranean principality.
When a reporter approached BFMTV to ask questions about the integrity of that package and several others broadcast by the channel, M’Barki was suspended.
The channels said in a statement that the packages did not go through the usual editorial validation procedures.
Team Jorge sells hacking and disinformation services to political and corporate clients who want to conduct covert influence-peddling campaigns. The team was exposed by the Guardian and an international consortium of reporters led by the French nonprofit Forbidden Stories.
The Guardian and Observer have partnered with an international consortium of reporters to investigate global disinformation. Our project, Disinfo black ops, is exposing how false information is deliberately spread by powerful states and private operatives who sell their covert services to political campaigns, companies and wealthy individuals. It also reveals how inconvenient truths can be erased from the internet by those who are rich enough to pay. The investigation is part of Story killers, a collaboration led by Forbidden Stories, a French nonprofit whose mission is to pursue the work of assassinated, threatened or jailed reporters.
The eight-month investigation was inspired by the work of Gauri Lankesh, a 55-year-old journalist who was shot dead outside her Bengaluru home in 2017. Hours before she was murdered, Lankesh had been putting the finishing touches on an article called In the Age of False News, which examined how so-called lie factories online were spreading disinformation in India. In the final line of the article, which was published after her death, Lankesh wrote: “I want to salute all those who expose fake news. I wish there were more of them.”
The Story killers consortium includes more than 100 journalists from 30 media outlets including Haaretz, Le Monde, Radio France, Der Spiegel, Paper Trail Media, Die Zeit, TheMarker and the OCCRP. Read more about this project.
Investigative journalism like this is vital for our democracy. Please consider supporting it today.
The leader of the unit, Tal Hanan, a former Israeli special forces operative who uses the alias “Jorge”, was filmed boasting about his ability to manipulate the media to spread propaganda, by undercover reporters posing as potential clients.
In one secretly filmed meeting, Hanan told the reporters he was able to have stories broadcast in France and then played a video clip.
One of the undercover reporters – Frédéric Métézeau, a Middle East correspondent at Radio France – recognised the clip as a report by M’Barki broadcast on BFMTV and approached the channel about the integrity of the package last month.
Alarm about the broadcasts escalated rapidly, leading to an internal investigation, and on 11 January M’Barki was taken off air and put on leave.
It is not clear whether Team Jorge was behind the BFMTV news package and, if so, how they planted the stories and on behalf of whom. The news website Politico, which first reported on the internal investigation at BFMTV, said a dozen suspicious broadcast packages were now under investigation.
BFMTV confirmed the investigation in a statement on 2 February, saying: “An internal investigation has been ongoing at BFMTV for two weeks after the discovery of content broadcast on our programme, Le journal de la nuit, outside the usual validation channels. The journalist in charge of Journal de la nuit has been suspended since the opening of this investigation.”
Marc-Olivier Fogiel, the chief executive of BFMTV, told the Forbidden Stories consortium: “At this stage, we remain cautious. But the fact remains that we are victims.”
In a statement, BFMTV’s society of journalists (SDJ), which seeks to defend the integrity of reporting, said it had “become aware of suspicions of interference concerning a journalist from our channel”. The statement said if the details reported were correct, “they are serious and reprehensible”, and the SDJ added that it hoped the internal investigation would get to the bottom of how the packages came to be broadcast.
In a comment to Politico, M’Barki denied any intentional misconduct. He said: “They were all real and verified. I do my job … I’m not ruling anything out, maybe I was tricked, I didn’t feel like I was or that I was participating in an operation of I don’t know what or I wouldn’t have done it.”
Tal Hanan, the head of Team Jorge, did not respond to detailed questions about the unit’s activities and methods but said: “I deny any wrongdoing.”
