This Thursday, January 22, the French public audiovisual service is set to air a new episode of Complément d’enquête entitled “Rumors and Dirty Tricks: The Secret France–Algeria War.”
A sensationalist title, a promise of scandal, and above all a new episode in what has now become an openly assumed drift: that of a public broadcaster which has traded journalistic rigor for the most rancid theses of the French far right.
Things must be called by their proper name. This is neither an investigation nor a balanced work of information, but a methodical disinformation enterprise in which Algeria serves as an obsessive target and a media cash cow. France Télévisions, supposedly the embodiment of rigor and public-service ethics, is adopting far-right narratives and once again offering a privileged platform to those who have made hatred of Algeria their rallying cry, their personal brand, and their gutter-level ideological business.
The Algerian obsession of a segment of the French political class has reached absurd heights. It crystallizes around a former pseudo-diplomat—an agitator afflicted with a genuine obsessive pathology called “Algeria.” During his two postings in the country, this disreputable individual relentlessly attempted to weaken Algeria and plunge it into chaos. He knows full well that in France, the louder the hatred of Algeria, the greater the reward.
The proof is there for all to see: today he is omnipresent on television sets, promoted as an “indispensable expert,” even though his sole capital rests on lies, excess, and baseness. For such a trajectory, what better reward than media celebrity?
Even more serious is the fact that this French public broadcaster now appears ready to do anything to shore up its hypotheses. By giving airtime to a drug dealer, a blackmailer, an illiterate thug with neither education nor intellectual legitimacy—whose manifest mission is to sow doubt and corrupt the minds of Algerian youth—it crosses yet another red line. Driven by his own deviance and his inability to build any socially useful role, this character ostentatiously flaunts signs of wealth and makes no attempt to hide the fact that he is maintained and protected by French services.
That French public broadcasting should sink so low into the media gutter bodes ill for relations between Algeria and France. Especially since this is far from a first offense: it is the third time this public outlet has launched a frontal attack on Algeria through biased narratives, crude approximations, and so-called “revelations” built on sand. And it naïvely imagines that senior Algerian figures could be placed on the same set as a vulgar drug dealer who is nothing more than a petty informant for French services.
A question therefore imposes itself: what is driving French public broadcasting to sink so low? Does the ratings war justify everything? Is buzz now worth moral abdication and professional failure? Or should this be seen as the deeper symptom of a French malaise—one incapable of viewing Algeria except through the prism of resentment, colonial nostalgia, and domestic political obsessions?
By seeking to resolve its own identity fractures at Algeria’s expense, French public broadcasting merely exposes its own impoverishment—an intellectual, editorial, and ethical impoverishment unworthy of a taxpayer-funded medium meant to serve the public interest, not the fantasies of a far right in perpetual search of scapegoats.
Algeria, for its part, has no need of such caricatures to exist. But media France, evidently, still needs Algeria to conceal its own excesses.
