PARIS: Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on Thursday accused a PR firm with links to French billionaire conservative Vincent Bollore of orchestrating a “vast disinformation campaign” against it.
The Paris-based NGO, known for its work in defending press freedom around the world, said the PR firm, Progressif Media, had set up false websites made to look like that of RSF.
It also sent out messages on X to discredit RSF, the NGO said.
The fake sites included content accusing RSF of trying to censor CNews, the country’s most popular news channel that is regularly accused of promoting far-right views.
Progressif Media, RSF found, is part-owned by Bollore’s telecoms conglomerate Vivendi, and is based on the same premises.
Vivendi also owns CNews and several other news organizations that are seen as shifting France’s media landscape to the right in recent years.
Vivendi, which denies political bias in its news outlets, told AFP it had “no knowledge of possible illegal practices attributed to Progressif Media by RSF.”
However, a spokesperson confirmed Progressif Media had been deployed by a part of its media empire “to counter certain arguments about CNews.”
“We will see what happens next, what choices Vivendi will make now that the facts have been exposed publicly,” said Arnaud Froger, head of RSF investigations.
CNews launched in 2017 and is often compared to Fox News in the United States.
According to RSF, the campaign came shortly after it made a formal complaint calling for stricter oversight of CNews.
Following RSF’s complaint, media regulator Arcom was instructed in February to tighten control over TV and radio stations to ensure balanced political coverage.
Bollore, known for having conservative views, has been gradually buying up many of the most important media companies in France, including film producers Canal+, Paris Match magazine and Europe 1 radio.

A hacker gained access to the internal messaging systems at OpenAI last year and stole details about the design of the company’s artificial intelligence technologies, the New York Times reported on Thursday.
The hacker lifted details from discussions in an online forum where employees talked about OpenAI’s latest technologies, the report said, citing two people familiar with the incident.
However, they did not get into the systems where OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, houses and builds its AI, the report added.
Microsoft Corp-backed OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
OpenAI executives informed both employees at an all-hands meeting in April last year and the company’s board about the breach, according to the report, but executives decided not to share the news publicly as no information about customers or partners had been stolen.
OpenAI executives did not consider the incident a national security threat, believing the hacker was a private individual with no known ties to a foreign government, the report said. The San Francisco-based company did not inform the federal law enforcement agencies about the breach, it added.
OpenAI in May said it had disrupted five covert influence operations that sought to use its AI models for “deceptive activity” across the Internet, the latest to stir safety concerns about the potential misuse of the technology.
The Biden administration was poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard the US AI technology from China and Russia with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI Models including ChatGPT, Reuters earlier reported, citing sources.
In May, 16 companies developing AI pledged at a global meeting to develop the technology safely at a time when regulators are scrambling to keep up with rapid innovation and emerging risks.