Sibyle Veil wants to explain this Sunday why she chose to issue a yellow card and not a red one against Guillaume Meurice. The CEO of Radio France thus states in La Tribune Sunday not having wanted to send a “signal” against “freedom of expression” by choosing, not to fire the comedian, but to call him to order.
He will speak from 6 p.m. on the program “Le Grand Dimanche soir” exceptionally without an audience, for security reasons due to the death threats he received after controversial remarks about the Israeli Prime Minister.
“A problematic sentence (…) which fortunately is an exception”
After having suggested for Halloween a “disguise” of Benyamin Netanyahu, “a sort of Nazi but without a foreskin”, in a sketch on France Inter at the end of October, Guillaume Meurice received a “warning” from the radio station which employs him.
Sibyle Veil, questioned by the Sunday newspaper to find out if she had “thought of dismissing him”, replied that the warning seemed to her a better decision. “I did not want to send a signal that some would have hastened to exploit,” explains the boss of public radio. “The value of freedom of expression, to which we are very attached, is much more important than a problematic sentence from a comedian, which fortunately is an exception,” she adds.
No real internal tensions
Sibyle Veil also takes the opportunity to minimize internal tensions. “In reality, it doesn’t create as much of a stir as you say (…) This week has been relatively calm.” She also deplores “a spiral of controversy which crushes everything. For ten days, we have only been talking about that, to the detriment of the 99.99% of other things that we do on our airwaves, notably the detailed coverage of the conflict in the Middle East.
In a context of high tensions around the war between Israel and Hamas, Guillaume Meurice’s joke earned him numerous and severe criticisms, as well as death threats. On Monday, the host claimed to have “made no mistake”. “I practice humor, caricature, political satire, and excess is part of it,” he argued in The worldhe who intends to “challenge in court” the warning he received.