France — news channels live

BFMTV launched in 2005 and quickly became France's most watched news channel. It belongs to the Altice group. Its model rests on continuous live output: uninterrupted studio anchoring through the day, field links and commentator discussion.

The channel is known for the speed of its response to developments, and hours of uninterrupted coverage during major events define its identity. That speed-driven model is itself a recurring subject of debate in France about the quality of news.

Domestic politics, the economy and social affairs dominate its agenda.

This is the French edition of euronews. The channel was founded in Lyon in 1993 as a joint venture of European public broadcasters and is built on publishing the same pictures in many languages with separate audio. The French edition carries the European agenda to a francophone audience.

Its coverage of European Union institutions makes it one of the few sources following Brussels on a routine basis. The No Comment strand, which publishes footage without commentary, runs here too.

France 24 launched in 2006 as an international news channel within the public body France Médias Monde. It publishes separate channels in four languages — French, English, Arabic and Spanish — a set that describes its target geography: Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Its greatest strength is African coverage. In francophone West Africa, France 24 reaches a wider audience than local broadcasters in many countries and plays a decisive part in carrying regional developments onto the international agenda. Security crises in the Sahel, elections and coups are subjects on which it keeps field teams routinely.

Public funding leaves it free of advertising pressure; its relationship with French foreign policy is periodically debated in return. Its verification unit, Les Observateurs, is known for authenticating audience-submitted footage and reporting from it.

franceinfo launched in 2016 as a public news channel and is a joint venture of four French public broadcasting bodies — France Télévisions, Radio France, France Médias Monde and INA. The partnership rests on the idea of pooling the country's public news resources into a single rolling channel.

The brand originates with the franceinfo radio station founded in 1987, France's first all-news radio and the outlet that introduced the continuous news format to the country. The television channel carries that tradition to screen: a news flow refreshed in short cycles, live links and verification output.

It is publicly funded and carries no advertising. For a reader who wants French domestic affairs straight from a public source, it is the primary channel.

LCI launched in 1994 as France's first rolling news channel and introduced continuous television news to the country. It belongs to the TF1 group. After many years as a subscription channel it moved to terrestrial transmission and opened to a wide audience.

Its identity rests on analysis and discussion programming, with a large block of the schedule given to interpreting the news rather than relaying it. Expert guests and panel formats are its characteristic mode.

RFI (Radio France Internationale) is France's international public radio service, part of France Médias Monde. It broadcasts in French and many other languages and has an extraordinarily wide audience in Africa in particular: across the continent's francophone countries RFI is regarded as a more reliable and further-reaching source of news than many local stations.

Though it began in radio it now produces video output as well. Its African journalism is among the principal sources for the international press during political crises and elections on the continent, with a correspondent network extending into regions many international channels cannot reach.

Its broadcasts in African languages such as Hausa, Swahili and Mandinka serve a distinct function where access to independent news is restricted.

TV5MONDE was founded in 1984 and is run as a partnership of public broadcasters from French-speaking countries, among them France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and Quebec. That structure makes it not the voice of one country but a shared broadcast of the francophone world.

Its news service, TV5MONDE Info, brings together French-language output from those different countries; on a single day a viewer can watch bulletins originating in Paris, Brussels, Geneva and Montreal. It is a convenient source for seeing how the same event is framed in different francophone capitals.

The channel also maintains a substantial archive of programming and resources for teaching French.