Paris (AFP)
RTL will stop its collaboration with polemicist Eric Zemmour, recently convicted for provoking religious hatred and subject to a new investigation after a violent anti-immigration and anti-Islam speech, the station said Thursday, confirming a information from the Puremédias website.
"Eric Zemmour will no longer participate in the 8:20 debate on Friday, which he already collaborated only occasionally," said the station said that during the last quarter, he had intervened only three times on the air.
The radio, however, specifies that "in the context of the plurality of opinions to which RTL is attached, the door is not closed to him", as a guest during broadcasts.
The station M6 group considers indeed that "following his stance, Eric Zemmour has changed status" and can no longer be seen as a journalist lambda, said an internal source.
The polemist, invited Saturday at the tribune of the "Convention of the Right", a meeting organized by the relatives of former right-wing MP Marion Maréchal, had attacked a violent speech to immigrants "colonizers" and cited the writer Renaud Camus, theoretician of the "great replacement" of the white and Christian population by a Muslim immigrant population.
This speech earned him the opening of an investigation by the Paris prosecutor for "public provocation to discrimination, hatred or violence" and has aroused many reactions in the political world, associations and in the media.
"The LDS office welcomes the fact that the management has (...) contacted Eric Zemmour to make his profound disagreement on both form and substance." While remaining very attached to the diversity of opinions, she has meant that his theses are incompatible with the spirit of the debates he participated in on the air, and more broadly with the + Living together + that characterizes RTL, "greeted the society of journalists (SDJ) in an internal message.
The SDJ du Figaro, another employer of Eric Zemmour, had also questioned his management, who said his "reprobation to the person concerned" and considered that "his words are not pronounced in the name of Le Figaro and do not commit anything " the newspaper.
On Paris Première where his show "Zemmour and Naulleau" was broadcast Wednesday night, Eric Zemmour defended and maintained his remarks. "I'm not hurting anyone," he said.
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