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Over the weekend, Jordan Bardella, a French far-right politician, published a book with the title Ce que je cherche, or What I’m Looking For. On its face, there was nothing out of the ordinary about this—“I wanted to speak directly to the French people in a one-on-one exercise, which no other format than writing really allows,” he told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche—even if some of the reviews were, perhaps, unusually biting. The left-leaning Libération remarked that the writing is so bad, the reader ends up believing that Bardella actually wrote the book himself. Le Monde noted that the risk of writing an autobiography at the age of twenty-nine is that you quickly run out of things to say.
But Bardella isn’t a very normal politician at all, and his age has a lot to do with it. He is already the president of the Rassemblement National, the far-right party whose figurehead is Marine Le Pen, and has been active in frontline politics practically his entire adult life. And, if he may not yet have mastered the musty medium of the political autobiography, he has been hailed in the press, in France and beyond, as a gifted social media communicator; ahead of elections to the legislative arm of the European Union earlier this year, in which Bardella would lead his party to a clear victory, Politico mocked up a graphic depicting him as a Ken doll in a box with the slogan “Far Right but with Boy Band Appeal,” while the New York Times described him as a “clean-cut, strong-jawed TikTok star.” Indeed, these days, Bardella has some two million followers on that platform, where he can be seen, variously, eating candy and mocking the mainstream media. I was bemused—and alarmed—earlier this year when my girlfriend showed me TikTok videos made by users thirsting over Bardella (look it up) that had shown up organically on a friend’s feed in the UK, without her having the slightest idea who he was. Some users have even created fan fiction depicting an imagined romance between Bardella and Gabriel Attal, a centrist political rival who was until recently France’s prime minister. In one video on Bardella’s own feed, he can be seen watching one such video and glancing slyly at the camera. It has been viewed 15.8 million times.
In a TikTok video promoting his new book—which splices together artful black-and-white footage of Bardella writing with images from his childhood and video from the campaign trail, all set to taut string music—Bardella spoke about it very differently than in his interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, in terms seemingly tailor-made for young users of social media. “I hesitated a long time before writing this book,” he can be heard saying in a voiceover. “The demand for transparency is a core part of our time. But I see in this injunction a form of violence. You will agree that the time for memories has not yet arrived.”
Bardella’s youthful appeal and online savvy aren’t just a stroke of luck for a far-right party that has traditionally been more associated with Holocaust denial and other racist and crankish positions—he appears to have been carefully groomed for the role he is now playing. (It should be noted that Bardella’s political views—to the extent he holds any; he has often been accused of being an empty vessel—appear to be barely distinguishable from the harsh anti-immigration rhetoric of his party’s older guard.) Indeed, even when the party was known as the Front National and led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine’s hard-line father, it was early to embrace new modes of communication as a means of circumventing more traditional media—not only as a matter of preference, but by necessity, since the elder Le Pen and his allies were typically shut out of mainstream forums. As the journalist David Doucet noted in 2016, voters could at one point dial a phone number to hear Le Pen read out his platform; in the early nineties, the party produced a video game that featured Le Pen running away, Pac-Man style, from supposed “enemies of France,” including the head of an anti-racism group. In 1996, the party was the first in France to set up its own website.
As I wrote in yesterday’s newsletter, since Donald Trump won the US presidential election last week, various denizens of the traditional media have entered a period of hand-wringing about the industry’s declining influence, and how Trump was able to sidestep it with the help of a well-developed right-wing media universe and popular podcasters, like Joe Rogan, who amplified his message to young men in particular. It’s important not to conflate all these things; as the New York Times’ Joseph Bernstein noted last week, “Joe Rogan is not the same as the Daily Wire, and talk about ‘ecosystems’ tends to collapse analytical distinctions that matter.” Comparing this web of alternative media venues to those of other countries is also tricky since it is tangled up in various, distinctively American phenomena, from bro culture to the political valence of different American sports.
Still, there are many similarities—not to mention direct links, in an increasingly globalized information environment—between the online venues that Trump was able to exploit in the US and those that Bardella and others have proved adept at navigating in France. At least in a broad sense, the latter story should remind US media watchers—at this moment of peak post-rationalization and introspection—that the use of alternative online apparatuses to cut out the mainstream media is neither new nor exclusively American. It’s a story that shows, too, how far-right politicians might seek to weaponize online spaces, but cannot control or even necessarily dominate them, at least not without pushback—and how the mainstream media still seems to matter to these politicians, however pessimistic we may currently be about our own power.
As I noted yesterday, while some of the recent hand-wringing about the declining influence of traditional media in the US has taken on an urgent, panicked tone, it reminds me in many ways of the reckoning that followed Trump’s win in 2016, when the growing power of the alt-right, and Breitbart in particular, was on the mind of many an observer. Around the same time, Doucet and a fellow journalist, Dominique Albertini, published a book on a French phenomenon that they compared to the alt-right: the fachosphère (or fascist-sphere, in English). Ideologically, Doucet and Albertini defined this realm broadly—including under its banner a range of far-right currents, from Catholic integralism to conspiratorial anti-Semitism—though it was united by its anti-system orientation and, crucially, its onlineness; its constituent far-right platforms and websites were often bootstrap operations, but their reach spanned everything from YouTube to (at least on the margins) amateur pornography. (One French observer noted at the time that the fachosphère appeared to be more ideologically driven than the alt-right, elements of which, at least, seemed to be more concerned with making money and were “much more American in that sense.” Breitbart, for its part, made noise about branching out into France but, as far as I can tell, never did.)
As the years went by, the online French far right continued to develop, including among influencers on platforms like YouTube and TikTok who, as the Financial Times reported in 2021, used “sex appeal, shock jokes, cartoons and memes to entice viewers to their often extreme views.” (One YouTuber staged a mock execution of a supporter of the left-wing presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon; he claimed it was a joke.) Much like pro-Trump influencers in the US, far-right influencers in France have often aimed to appeal to young people who aren’t otherwise politically engaged. And, as the researcher Tristan Boursier wrote earlier this year, there is a gender component here: such influencers are not all white men, but many are, and “antifeminism” has been a “structuring theme” among them, one that serves as a gateway drug to, for example, biological racism. The focus on Bardella’s TikTok presence, Boursier suggested, is only the tip of the iceberg of right-wing dynamics online.
As Bernstein and others have noted, Rogan and other social media stars who ended up backing Trump didn’t necessarily emerge from this sort of organized far-right politics online; they entered a similar space in messier ways, and still make content that is not always explicitly political. In many ways, this development has been quite specific to the US and to Trump. (When I searched around for a “French Joe Rogan,” I didn’t get very far; the only one-to-one comparison I found relates to Rogan’s involvement in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.) But in very general terms, podcasts are increasingly popular in France, as elsewhere. And platforms like YouTube and Twitch have increasingly been home to political news, including around elections. Ahead of the presidential vote in 2022, Marine Le Pen sat down with a YouTuber who quizzed her on pop culture, asking her to tell the difference between, for example, Tom Holland and Timothée Chalamet. (“They look like two brothers,” Le Pen said.)
This is not to say that the political far right is the undisputed champion of alternative online media in France. Le Pen’s party may have had ties to key figures within the fachosphère, but it has never been able to control that space. (Some voices have in recent years rebelled against her, casting her as overly moderate.) And Mélenchon, the left-wing politician, may be much older than Bardella (he is seventy-three) but has long been very visible on YouTube, for example; according to a tally in Le Monde, he got the most airtime across that platform and Twitch ahead of the first round of the 2022 election. He was narrowly eliminated; Emmanuel Macron, the incumbent president, beat Le Pen in the runoff following a short campaign in which the pair roughly tied for YouTube and Twitch exposure. These days, Macron has more TikTok followers than Bardella (with nearly five million). So, too, does Mélenchon.
In the US, too, right-wing dominance of alternative online spaces is perhaps being overplayed at the moment: during the campaign, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz themselves showed up on popular podcasts and Twitch streams; liberals have their own popular podcasts and influencers, like Pod Save America. (Following elections, the winner typically gets to set the narrative that they were the one with the revolutionary communications strategy, whatever their margin of victory and the true reasons for it.) As the tech writer Taylor Lorenz noted last week, however, Democrats do face structural disadvantages—having to do with money and institutional initiative—when it comes to building their own equivalents to Rogan and the right-wing mediasphere. France may show something similar; as Le Monde has reported, far-right talking points, which are often simple and emotive, enjoy algorithmic advantages over much left-wing messaging. And yet in that country, content creators—many of them not particularly political—have in recent times spoken out against the rise of the far right. (Bardella personally clapped back at one such influencer, accusing him of chasing clout.) Some of these efforts have stood out for their coordination. Ahead of snap national legislative elections over the summer, which Macron called after Bardella’s win in the European vote, one effort, organized by a talent agency, saw more than two hundred influencers call for the far right to be blocked from power. Another, supported by some three hundred internet personalities, explicitly endorsed the political left, under the moniker of “the Popular Stream.”
Bardella’s party was expected to win those elections, perhaps with enough seats to form a government (Macron would have remained the president either way)—but in the end, in a huge political shock, the left came out on top, and the far right was beaten into third place. As I wrote at the time, this was the result of a “republican front” that came together to stop the far right from winning—an ad hoc electoral dynamic that reflected a longer-standing cultural imperative, across the French mainstream, to stand in the far right’s way. The Popular Stream could be understood in that tradition. So could similar statements made by hundreds of French journalists, who called for a “common front” against the far right.
This tradition is a large part of the reason that the far right, dating back to the days of Le Pen père, used digital methods to circumvent the mainstream media. But these days, as I’ve explored repeatedly in this newsletter, hard-right ideas have gained traction across this landscape, too—in the broader political debate but also, in some cases, via attempts to buy up and reorient existing newsrooms, not least those now owned by the right-wing billionaire Vincent Bolloré. Journalists worldwide might increasingly see their institutions as powerless, but the far right seems to disagree, at least in France. As the journalists who called for a “common front” against them put it earlier this year, far-right figures have viewed traditional media as “favored terrain” in their bid to “conquer” political power.
If Bardella is a master of TikTok, more old-fashioned TV and radio hits have been key to his meteoric political rise as well; he may exude “boy band appeal” online, but he presents himself to older voters more as the “ideal son-in-law,” as various French outlets have put it. According to Le Monde, his new book is the first by a leader of his party ever to be produced by a major publisher: a subsidiary of Hachette, which Bolloré now owns. Since his takeover, numerous staffers have quit, fearing a lurch toward the right. (In an open letter, some of them called the publication of Bardella’s book “nothing other than an enlargement of the Overton window,” a concept often used to describe the spectrum of acceptable political opinion in a society.) A similar wave of staff protest has been seen at a news media property that Bolloré acquired: Le Journal du Dimanche. On Sunday, the paper splashed its interview with Bardella across its front page. The headline read: “My values for France.”
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Stephen J. Adler argues that to better represent the diversity of the US, national newsrooms need to collaborate with local partners. “In all the lacerating postmortems on what the media got wrong in covering the 2024 election, one of what should be the most salient questions is largely being ignored,” Adler writes. “If the major national news organizations are all based in Manhattan and DC—where Kamala Harris racked up 81 and 90 percent of the vote, respectively—how can they possibly reflect the concerns of the rest of the country?” Meanwhile, Sheila S. Coronel, the dean of academic affairs at Columbia Journalism School, offered US journalists ten tips for reporting in an autocracy, sourced from those who have experienced doing so in Egypt, Russia, the Philippines, and farther afield.
- Trump is continuing to staff up his incoming administration; overnight, we learned that Kristi Noem—the South Dakota governor who sparked a tough news cycle (even in right-wing media) earlier this year after writing in a memoir about shooting her dog—will serve as Homeland Security secretary. Trump also tapped Tom Homan—the acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during his first term, who has since been a paid contributor on Fox News—as his “border czar,” suggesting, as CNN’s Brian Stelter put it, that Trump is “poised to remake the Fox News White House.” (A Fox spokesperson confirmed to CNN that Homan is no longer a paid contributor to the network after accepting his new government role.)
- Yesterday, the union representing tech staffers at the New York Times put an end to a strike that it called last week, right before the election, in protest of stalled contract talks and alleged unfair labor practices; the union said that the strike had served as “a warning” to the Times, but agreement has still yet to be reached on a contract, and anticipated high-level disruption to the paper’s election coverage was avoided. Stelter reports that some Times journalists are “furious” about the way in which the union handled the strike; one reporter, Jeremy W. Peters, dismissed it as an “unpopular, self-indulgent stunt” that only diminished the bargaining power of Times workers.
- Yesterday, COP29, this year’s edition of the high-level United Nations climate summit, kicked off in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Ahead of time, various rights groups noted that the country’s government has recently intensified clampdowns on freedom of speech, not least among members of the press; the Committee to Protect Journalists called Azerbaijan’s treatment of reporters “absolutely incompatible with the human rights values expected of a United Nations host country” and called on visiting delegations to speak up. (I wrote about the crackdown last year.)
- And the Tennis Channel indefinitely suspended the journalist Jon Wertheim from appearing on air after he was caught on a hot mic making a disparaging comment about the size of the Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejčíková’s forehead. Krejčíková condemned the remark as disrespectful; Wertheim said that he had been making an off-air joke based on a graphic he’d been shown, but apologized and acknowledged that he is “not the victim.” “I am accountable,” he added. “I own this.”
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