Taking a step back, favoring field work, “telling the story of France and the world from the perspective of men and women”, this is Karim Rissouli’s new bet on France 5. Since September 17, the journalist has presented a new program entitled “En société”, broadcast every Sunday at 6:40 p.m., just before “C politique”, taken over by Thomas Snégaroff. This magazine gives pride of place to reports, great stories, portraits and invites journalists from the editorial team to explain behind the scenes of their work on set.
Each week he also devotes a long testimony to societal subjects, such as incest, discussed during the first issue with Judge Edouard Durand, co-president of Ciivise (Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Children). An ambitious new format and a major challenge at a time of media hype. Karim Rissouli answered questions from “20 Minutes”.
How did this idea for a magazine come about?
We said to ourselves that speech was king in many shows, including in “C ce soir”, a debate show where we removed a lot of images from the very beginning. The idea is to renew our way of telling the story of society and the times, with an emphasis on reporting. In “C politique”, we invited intellectuals to decipher society and we tried to make subjects and reports stick to our common thread guest. There, it’s the opposite, it’s the reports, the portraits etc., which dictate the rest of the set. I really think it can also fit with the need of the moment to slow down. There is a form of information fatigue which is expressed by many French people. The challenge is to make strong choices and succeed in sticking to them.
Everything is moving very quickly now, one piece of information chases another. How to choose your subjects?
It forces us to be better in our choices, our anticipations. What all journalists do, by the way, is not revolutionizing the profession. It’s a bias that is a bit risky because we are all used to a moment of acceleration where we are constantly bombarded with information. We really need to be able to differentiate ourselves from hard news, which is covered by news channels or daily broadcasts, and to have added value. If we don’t have one, we have no reason to exist.
Your promise is to “tell the story of France and the world from the perspective of men and women”. Do you feel like the media is sometimes disconnected from them?
I do not believe. But I think we are all looking for the right way to embody society. With my teams, we felt the need to go back and see what was happening on the ground. I don’t think that the media have a tendency to no longer do their job, but it is true that reporting tends to be less present. When news channels were born, there were more reports and fewer duplexes or sets. Now there is speech everywhere, all the time. The fact of returning to the field is perhaps also fighting against an ease that we can also have. Because it’s easier to make a set with 4 or 5 guests in reality, we can set it up in the morning and we’ll discuss together what’s happening in the world. Going into the field costs more but it is extremely important to do so.
Is this also a way of detaching ourselves from the debates and controversies which sometimes agitate the political class and do not necessarily reflect the concerns of the French?
My obsession would be to make easy clash and buzz shows. From the beginning we have tried to make programs that move away from controversies. Sometimes we don’t succeed and we fail, but I fundamentally believe that we have a responsibility as journalists. I’m given the chance to host shows that talk about society and I don’t want to do anything with it. I don’t want to waste my time in sterile controversies. My goal, my ambition, is that after seeing “C ce soir” or “En société”, we are nourished by what we have seen, that it fuels our thinking. It is an enormous luxury that we have to do this job in these conditions and I believe that we have at least a civic and also political responsibility, in the noble sense of the term.
Faced with the proliferation of fake news, many media outlets devote their time to “debunking” it. Was the question raised for this new format?
This is not the spirit of this show where the report guides us and not the chronicle. Even if we remain very attentive to that obviously. Afterwards, we decided to bring the reporters on set, not to debunker but to tell about their work, to be transparent. This is a very strong issue when we talk about fake news, post-truth, distrust of journalists. We must be as transparent as possible about our way of working and the questions we ask ourselves.
So there is a desire for transparency, to explain your approach?
We are still one of the two or three most hated professions in France today and we must also try to understand why. I am always in favor of recognizing your mistakes, of making a mea culpa when you are wrong. And to try to rebuild a bond of trust with those who watch us. It is fundamental in a democracy that the population has confidence in its media. This is what is currently at stake in what we call post-truth. If we don’t agree on facts, we can’t debate. To be able to live peacefully in a democracy, we must first agree on the facts and we also need journalists for that, to establish them.
Arcom regularly alerts on representation of women just like diversity on television. For your first issue, you invited three Franco-Iranian women to look back on the year that has passed since the death of Mahsa Amini. Is this a point on which you have particular vigilance?
The representation of diversity, particularly gender parity, is an obsession for us, but we can’t do it either. We are not necessarily better than others in this area, we must make progress. We must be 60% men and 40% women. By doing “Cpolitics” with this common thread guest who agreed to respond on many different subjects for 1 hour and 20 minutes, we realized that many women refused to come, explaining that they did not feel legitimate on all the subjects. Where men often don’t care that they aren’t and agree to come. It’s quite striking. By removing this common thread guest and bringing in people on very specific themes, I think we will achieve parity. It will be a format that will surely be more equal and more egalitarian.
Magazine or report shows are widely broadcast on competing channels in the same time slot. How to find your place and stand out?
We have a very different tone from “7 to 8” on TF1 or “66 Minutes” on M6. It is also a desire to say that there is an audience that wants reporting at that time and there is no reason why we cannot convince them to come and watch us. It’s a challenge but I think we have the weapons to take it on. We will also offer reporting, in our own way, with our own added value. Someone who watches “7 to 8” today may very well watch “En société” tomorrow. Or watch both!
In the fall, you will present a new format entitled “In opposing lands”. What is the principle?
The idea is to say to ourselves that we can be useful and that we can try to get people in France who no longer speak to each other or who don’t know each other to talk again. To also bring intellectuals, committed artists or politicians off TV sets and take them to live an experience in opposing lands. For the first, environmental activist Camille Etienne went to the Castelet F1 circuit in the Var to meet French people who are in love with their car. The fact that she agrees to come, that she spends time meeting them and establishes quasi-friendly relationships with them – who nevertheless think the opposite of her on an ideological level – creates a different debate, with empathy. Even if in the end we don’t end up reconciling everyone, we are not naive either. In any case, people are listening to each other more and I find these to be very striking experiences.
This fractured society is precisely at the heart of your new show “En société”.
We hear a lot about it and it’s partly the reality, about an archipelagoized, fractured, damaged society… It’s part of the social issues today but I think that society is much richer than that. I don’t want to settle for being just archipelagos that no longer communicate. Being a society is something I still believe in. Afterwards, we each have our part to contribute and at our level as journalists this is also the ambition of this show.