Former French Media Executive Fined for Anti-Muslim Comments

"Muslims, they don’t care about the Republic," Jean-Claude Dassier, the former head of the LCI channel and former president of the Olympique de Marseille football club, had declared in December 2022 during a debate on juvenile delinquency. Two years later, these remarks, which had provoked the indignation of the Union of Mosques of France, which had announced that it would file a complaint in January 2023, earned him a suspended fine of 1,000 euros. He was absent from his trial on December 4, 2024, and was not represented by a lawyer. The Paris Criminal Court then ordered him to pay the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism, a civil party, 1,000 euros "in compensation for its moral prejudice", and 1,000 euros for legal costs.

In its judgment dated February 10, the court considered that these were "outrageous and contemptuous remarks [...] coming to demean and discredit all persons of the Muslim faith."

The commentator returned to the air in February 2023 to acknowledge his "mistake": "Sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we tend to generalize, to globalize [...]. We must always apologize when we make inaccuracies." At the time, he had not been supported by Cnews. The "CNews presenter Barbara Klein had distanced herself, at the end of February, on behalf of the channel and its editorial staff, from the remarks made two days earlier by Dassier and not contradicted on the set," recalls Le Monde. In the eyes of the independent rapporteur appointed by the Audiovisual and Digital Communication Regulatory Authority, there was no grounds to open sanction proceedings against CNews.