The campaign to destroy GB News in Britain is precisely mirrored by a campaign to eliminate CNEWS, its French equivalent.

The French political and media establishment would dearly like to shut down CNEWS which has overtaken #BFMTV (ipso facto BF Macron TV) as the most watched news station here.

The campaign against CNEWS is intensifying since the channel has started routinely beating its establishment competitors. This seems also to be the case with GB News.

The station’s refusal to conform to the groupthink of the establishment Parisian media blob is driving the bien-pensants mad. The accusation that it’s an extreme-right disinformation machine is absurd. It tilts right, but no more than all the other stations tilt left. It’s oppositional, just as its rivals tend to line up behind whoever is in power.

Owned by Vincent Bolloré, a traditional Catholic and by default France’s most politically incorrect tycoon, CNEWS has assembled a star cast of presenters of whom the most impressive is the whippet-smart, Guadeloupe-born Christine Kelly, whose prime time show goes where the other networks tread lightly. It is regularly attracting 550,000 viewers, albeit only 3.4 per cent of the audience.

The critics seem easily triggered. The recent minister of education, Pap Ndiaye, described CNEWS as ‘far-right’ media. ‘They are harming democracy, there is no doubt,’ he said.

The subsidised dailies Le Monde (gauche caviar) and Libération (hard left) portray the station as a mouthpiece of the extreme right.

But its real crime seems to be discussing subjects studiously avoided by all the other public and private broadcasters: immigration, urban insecurity, the crisis of national education and the rise of woke. Le Monde even assigned one of its journalists to watch nothing but CNEWS for five days. He found contempt for the left, criticism of the executive and perhaps worst of all, sympathy for Eric Zemmour. Contempt for the right, slavish fidelity to the executive and hatred for Eric Zemmour on all other stations is all good, it seems, in the media bubble of Paris.

Libération has been most vociferous in its attacks on CNEWS, calling it homophobic and a sock puppet for the National Front (now the Rassemblement National).

‘Libération is to the French press what the Titanic is to boating,’ retorted CNEWS commentator Pascal Praud.

The problem for the left is that CNEWS commentators tend to behave like independent thinkers and not apologists for the establishment. Viewers seem to prefer this approach to that offered by its main rival.

Christine Kelly and Pascal Praud of CNEWS will never be invited to interview Emmanuel Macron in prime time because neither would hesitate to challenge the president’s claims.

The vector for attacking CNEWS will be to contest the station’s licence renewal next year before L’Autorité de régulation de la communication audiovisuelle (Arcom), the French equivalent of Ofcom. Arcom is stuffed with establishment figures. Its director is a graduate of the elite École National d’Administration. There are more than 70 channels available but it won’t be a surprise if no room is found for CNEWS in the next allocation.

The parallels to the campaign to drive GBNews off the air in Britain are striking. On both sides of the channel the campaigns are driven by journalists who should know better and politicians uncomfortable with journalists they can’t control. Neither station can claim an unblemished record, but who can?