Sibyle Veil admits to having removed Thomas Legrand from the air
Sibyle Veil also wanted to defend, in an interview with Le Monde, her choice not to bring journalist Thomas Legrand back on air. Thomas Legrand was accused a year ago of collusion with the Socialist Party, after the broadcast of a video filmed without his knowledge, triggering a vast controversy over the impartiality of public broadcasting.
“In the published video, we hear Thomas Legrand boasting in front of political leaders that he can invite so-and-so to the station, as if it were rain or shine,” Sibyle Veil pointed out in the daily. “It is false and it gives the unacceptable feeling of collusion between journalists and politicians which the French no longer want,” she continued.
The journalist, for his part, denounced his “total and lasting invisibilization of the antenna” in a column in Le Monde at the end of August, saying he was the victim of “an external, misleading and manipulative campaign”. “The presidency of Radio France seems to me too porous to these external pressures,” he also declared to Télérama magazine.
“Thomas Legrand is making himself the martyr for the independence of public broadcasting,” replied Sibyle Veil on Thursday. “True independence is the assurance for the French that no one, neither a government nor a journalist nor a leader, has public broadcasting as their own property,” she added. “This explains why we do not want his return in a regular meeting on France Inter,” concluded the manager.
