France
France is experiencing significant political and media turmoil. No fewer than five prime ministers have served during Macron’s second term and distrust in politics is increasing as trust in the media remains low. But as the contest for the 2027 presidential race hots up, some conservative media are becoming more overtly partisan than in the past.
Turnout in the March 2026 local elections was 57% in a highly polarised landscape where the far right and far left were successful in winning over the youngest voters. The election was hit by a disinformation campaign based on websites designed to look like local media sites. While in general interest in news is low at 36%, interest in the local elections meant that genuine news sites saw significantly increased traffic for reporting and results during the two rounds.
However, traffic alone can’t generate the revenues needed to support original journalism. The digital-born and subscriber-funded Mediapart is both profitable and growing, with nearly 260,000 subscribers, and plans to create ten new jobs in 2026. Meanwhile Le Figaro and Le Monde, the two main daily national newspapers, are both seeing some growth in digital subscriptions, to 315,000 and over 600,000 respectively.
But most media companies are facing tough times. TV viewer numbers are holding up better than elsewhere but the market leaders, TF1 and M6, are cutting costs faced with falling advertising revenues. The Bertelsmann-owned M6 group plans to save €80m by 2030 through reducing production costs and a freeze on recruiting new journalists on long-term contracts. Amongst publishers, Ouest France, the best-selling French daily newspaper, with 800 journalists, plans to save €13m p.a. partly to invest in their new TV channel Novo19 based in Rennes. Following the end of its fact-checking contract with Facebook and the pressures on its major media clients, AFP, the French news agency, plans to save €10–12m p.a. by reducing the number of Paris-based journalists sent abroad.
Publishers are currently bringing a case against Microsoft and LinkedIn to receive payment when their content is reused. But some newspapers are moving towards greater cooperation with tech companies over AI. Le Monde struck a deal with OpenAI in 2024, with a significant undeclared cash payment in return for access to their content, and then in 2025 signed an AI deal with Perplexity; Le Monde and Le Figaro are also both now partnering with Meta AI.1
Ahead of what is expected to be a fiercely fought presidential race in 2027, in which President Macron can’t stand again, the PSB France TV is under intense scrutiny. Reduced public funding will lead to an €80m cut for France TV from their 2026 budget of €2.37bn. France TV responded with a major transparency operation on francetelevisions.fr, providing detailed data about its spending on programmes, independent producers, salaries, and travel.
A parliamentary commission has examined PSB spending and independence, with over 230 people called to give evidence. Some observers see the commission as being driven by the far-right, with the aim of weakening the PSB before the presidential election. The commission’s criticisms are often amplified by the Bolloré-owned media (C News, JDD – Journal du Dimanche – and Europe 1 radio). During his evidence, Vincent Bolloré attacked PSBs for spending that he described as being out of control.
The French DNR data show that people have a net negative view of the effect of PSB news on society: 31% are negative versus 22% positive, with the most negative attitudes from those who self-identify on the right; 65% of respondents with negative views of the social impact of PSB news cited the influence of politicians. Looking across news media as a whole, 66% of the sample think media owners influence news coverage, as against 64% for politicians and governments.
Of French respondents, 29% say they get some news from creators, but only a tiny minority (3%) say creators meet all of their news needs. Following the success of HugoDécrypte, who now ranks seventh in our online brand list (just behind the PSB online service France Info), some prominent broadcasters – such as former anchor Claire Chazal – have launched their own YouTube channels, in her case helped by the very successful 28-year-old YouTuber Gaspard G, who has over 1.5m subscribers and significant sponsorship.2 In an interesting twist, Gaspard G has been commissioned by the leading broadcaster TF1 to produce a series of political programmes ahead of the 2027 presidential elections for their YouTube channel, TF1 info.3 Of our sample, 61% currently consume news video each week, and plenty of others are now hoping for new business opportunities there.
Alice Antheaume
Executive Dean, Sciences Po Journalism School
In the online survey we ask respondents which news brands they have used to access news in the last week. These figures are based on respondents’ recall of the news sources they have used, and should be understood as survey-based measures of weekly brand reach for news.
They are not the same as web analytics, audience ratings, or other audience measurement systems (such as BARB for television in the UK). Those approaches use different methods and may measure different things. Our figures are based on what respondents tell us in an online survey about which brands they have used for news in the past week.
It is also important to note that we ask specifically about use for news. Some multi-genre broadcasters, newspapers, or other providers offer content beyond news, and the figures in our report should not be interpreted as measuring the overall audience reach for these media organisations. They refer only to respondents who say they used that brand to access news.
How do you ask about offline and online news reach?
We ask about offline and online reach separately. First, we ask respondents which brands they have used to access news offline in the last week, via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. Then we ask which brands they have used to access news online in the last week, via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of internet access.
The questions as asked in the survey are:
Which of the following brands have you used to access news offline in the last week (via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media)? Please select all that apply.
Which of the following brands have you used to access news online in the last week (via websites, apps, social media, and other forms of Internet access)? Please select all that apply.
Respondents can select more than one brand in each question. For that reason, the figures do not add up to 100%. They show the proportion of respondents who say they used each brand for news in the last week.
How do you present the weekly news reach data in the report?
On each country or market page, we present the most widely used brands in two charts: one for offline news reach and one for online news reach. The offline chart covers use via TV, radio, print, and other traditional media. The online chart covers use via websites, apps, social media, and other internet-based forms of access.
The figures shown are weekly news reach: the percentage of respondents who say they used that brand for news at least once in the last week.
These figures are useful for comparing the relative news reach of different brands within each market, and for understanding how news use is distributed across offline and online sources. However, they should not be treated as market shares or measures of total time spent with a brand.
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
The brand selection is a strategic sample and not a comprehensive list of all news providers in each market. We consult with country or market experts, review prior years’ Digital News Report data, and draw on other data sources to identify the most widely used brands for news across traditional and online channels.
In some cases, where a news provider operates a number of related news brands, we aggregate these under a single heading. For example, in the UK, reach for the BBC may include use of several BBC news services across different platforms. This is done to give a clearer sense of the overall reach of major news providers, but it means that figures may not always refer to a single programme, website, app, newspaper, or channel.
Because of survey length limitations, we can only ask about a limited number of brands in each market. The charts should not be treated as exhaustive lists of every brand used for news in that market. Due to space limitations, reach charts show up to 16 of the most used brands, though we ask about more in each survey.
How should the offline and online figures be interpreted?
A respondent may use the same brand both offline and online, and may also use several different brands in the same week. For this reason, the offline and online figures should not be added together to calculate a total audience. They are best read as separate indicators of how far particular brands reach people through different forms of access.
As with other survey-based findings, small differences should be interpreted with caution. We are careful not to claim that one brand reaches more people than another, or that a brand’s reach has changed, unless the differences are large enough to be meaningful. Any year on year change of 2 percentage points or lower is not considered statistically significant.
Changing media
Use of TV news has not changed from last year and social media is steadily increasing, while print, now at 12%, is less than half the level it was ten years ago.
Pay for online news
12%
(+1)
Avoid the news sometimes/often
37%
(+1)
Trust in news overall
29%
(-)
Global average: 37%
Trust remains unchanged at the low level of 29%, but France’s relative position has risen because of declines elsewhere. Local newspapers and PSBs are broadly trusted, whereas the commercial 24-hour news channels BFMTV and C News have much lower levels of public trust.
We ask each respondent to rate a number of popular brands (usually 15 in each country) according to how trustworthy they think each brand’s news output is. We do this on a 0-10 scale, where a score of 0 means that the respondent does not see the brand as trustworthy at all and 10 means that they see the brand as completely trustworthy – with 5 meaning ‘neither trustworthy or untrustworthy’. There is an option for those who have not heard of any particular brand to ensure that scores are based only on responses from people who are familiar with each brand.
When we come to report these scores, we add up the proportion of respondents that give a score between 6-10 and mark this as ‘trust’. We also add up the proportion that give a brand a score between 0-4 and mark this as ‘don’t trust’.
The question as asked in the survey is…
How trustworthy would you say news from the following brands is? Please use the scale below, where 0 is ‘not at all trustworthy’ and 10 is ‘completely trustworthy’.
As we make explicit throughout the report, including next to tables presenting brand-level trust findings, whether respondents consider a brand trustworthy or not is their subjective judgement. The percentage figures shown are aggregates of people’s personal opinions, they are not an objective assessment of underlying trustworthiness. We leave it to each respondent to form an opinion on whether they trust someone or something, and we field the question because we consider the resulting data to be important.
How do you present the trust data in the report?
We present the data in an alphabetised table. In the past, we presented this data as a stacked bar chart, but this led some to treat the chart as a list of the most and least trusted news brands in a given market, despite our explicit explanation this was not what the tables showed.
We present the data in a way that avoids giving small differences the appearance of great importance. In cases where there is around two percentage points difference or less between the brands, we cannot say for sure that one brand is more trusted than another. We are careful not to try to claim that one brand is more trusted than another or that trust scores have changed unless those changes are statistically significant.
Due to survey length limitations, it is important to note that we only ask about 15 of the most widely used brands. It is very likely that there are brands with lower (and higher) trust scores that we do not ask about. For that reason, we cannot say that any brand is the least (or most) trusted overall. Next to each chart we are careful to say: “Only the below brands were included in the survey. It should not be treated as a list of the most or least trusted brands as it is not exhaustive.”
How do you choose which brands to ask about?
We consult with country or market experts, draw on prior years’ Digital News Report data and other data sources to determine the most widely used brands (across traditional and online channels) when it comes to news. We also try to include ‘local newspapers’ or ‘local television’ as catch-all titles as we recognise their impact is considerable in most markets.
How representative is this 48-market survey?
The Digital News Report survey is based on an online poll but the methodology selects participants to be as representative of national populations as possible. Samples are assembled using representative quotas for age, gender, and region in every market and data is weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data. The full methodology can be found here.
How do you try to contextualise the findings to ensure that trust scores are not taken out of context or misinterpreted?
Trust is one of a number of measures we track, including consumption of different sources, device usage, social media use, and much more. We aim to maintain consistency in our measurements year-on-year so that ratings of trust, levels of news consumption, and more, can be contextualised.
Country data is accompanied by an 800-word commentary from a media expert that aims to set the data in a wider context. We write a short commentary on the trust scores where appropriate, noting any statistically relevant changes.
RSF World Press Freedom Index
25/180
Score 76.68
Measure of press freedom from NGO Reporters Without Borders based on expert assessment. More at rsf.org
Footnotes
1 https://www.lemonde.fr/en/about-us/article/2025/12/05/ai-meta-signs-partnership-agreement-with-several-international-media-outlets-including-le-monde_6748182_115.html
2 https://intello.co/talent/claire-chazal/
3 https://www.instagram.com/p/DW4lQkEDEtX/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA%3D%3D