2023-11-29 22:29:00
To decipher the mechanics at work behind the scenes of “Touche pas à mon poste” (TPMP), the host’s flagship show, journalist Virginie Vilar interviewed around thirty direct collaborators, 15 of whom denounced “a difficult climate”, most of them on condition of anonymity.
Cyril Hanouna is notably presented by an anonymous source as a “guru” who “makes you understand that you are shit” and who has the power to remove his columnists from the air “like that, suddenly”.
The strong man of C8 is also accused of having “briefed” his troops before a broadcast on a news item targeting a child so that at least “two of them” claim to be for the death penalty.
The documentary unsurprisingly returns to the host’s “sanguine and flowery” style, as well as several of the controversies which earned C8 a shower of warnings and sanctions from Arcom – for a total of 7.5 million euros – including the one involving guests wrongly presented as Brav-M police officers.
“Not a journalist”
We discover in particular that their first name, contact details and professional card were transmitted by the production on “judicial requisition”, even though it had promised them anonymity. “We are not journalists, we are not a press agency,” responds Lionel Stan, Cyril Hanouna’s right-hand man and general director of his production company H20, in the documentary.
Cyril Hanouna “wanted to be considered a journalist in the noble sense of the term”, testifies his defender Arnaud Lagardère, whose eponymous group has just been bought by Vivendi, the parent company of C8, controlled by billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
The aim of the documentary is not to “knock down, bring down” Cyril Hanouna, Virginie Vilar assured Wednesday to a handful of journalists, including AFP. But rather to “dissect the mechanics of the show”, added the presenter of “Complément d’Enquête”, Tristan Waleckx.
This broadcast on Thursday at 11:00 p.m. is the culmination of a long controversy between the France 2 magazine and the powerful 49-year-old host-producer, who refused to be interviewed, unlike the rapper Booba, detractor of Cyril Hanouna , which will take place at the end of the show.
In May, in TPMP, Hanouna promised that this issue would mark “the end” of “Complement of investigation”, before subsequently pleading “a valve”.
Monday in TPMP, he mockingly broadcast the trailer for the show, reading the press release from France Télé, which attributes to him a fortune “estimated at 85 million euros”. An “uncorrect figure”, according to him. “Otherwise the rest is not bad,” he commented.
“Reprisals”
Yet experienced, Virginie Vilar assured Télérama that it was “the most complicated investigation of her entire career”, between intimidation maneuvers and accusations of paying false witnesses.
Télérama itself carried out an investigation into the host and mentioned the “fear of reprisals” from its anonymous sources.
The weekly points out a form of silence within the media of the Bolloré empire on Cyril Hanouna, whose show brings in half of C8’s revenues (“7.5 million in September”), according to “Complément d’ Investigation”.
Launched in 2010 on France 4 and transferred in 2012 to D8, now C8, TPMP, live every weekday pre-evening, attracted an average of 1.8 million viewers last month on its main slot.
The show, which mixes entertainment and current affairs debates, is regularly accused of favoring clashes or even conveying false information. Its defenders, however, argue that TPMP attracts a more popular audience than equivalent shows.
TPMP columnist since the start of the school year and himself a former presenter of “Complément d’investigation”, Jacques Cardoze recently announced that he was preparing a counter-documentary for C8 on the France 2 magazine for early 2024. He accuses him of “drift” and have become “politicized” on the left.
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