Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [43]
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MEDIA
The main national daily newspapers are Le Figaro (centre-right; aimed at professionals, businesspeople and the bourgeoisie; www.lefigaro.fr), Le Monde (centre-left; popular with professionals and intellectuals; www.lemonde.fr), France Soir (right-wing; working and middle class; www.francesoir.fr), Libération (left-wing; popular with students and intellectuals; www.liberation.fr) and L’Humanité (communist; working-class and intellectuals; www.humanite.fr). The capital’s own daily is Le Parisien (centre; working class; www.leparisien.fr) and is easy to read if you have basic French. L’Équipe (www.lequipe.fr) is a daily devoted exclusively to sport and Paris Turf (www.paris-turf.com) to horse racing.
News weeklies with commentary include the comprehensive, left-leaning Le Nouvel Observateur (http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com) and the more conservative L’Express (www.lexpress.fr).
For some investigative journalism blended with satire, pick up a copy of Le Canard Enchainé (www.lecanardenchaine.fr) – assuming your French is of a certain level, of course. Paris Match (www.parismatch.com) is a gossipy, picture-heavy weekly with a penchant for royalty and film stars; they milked the Sarkozy divorce-and-rebound-remarriage histoire (story) for all it was worth – and then some. No group of people in Europe blog as much as the French do – the total at the moment is more than three million and growing – and there is no better way to understand what the French are thinking at the moment than entering the French blogosphere (Click here).
Public radio is grouped under the umbrella of Radio France (www.radiofrance.fr), which broadcasts via a network of dozens of radio stations, of which seven are the most important. These include national stations France Inter (87.8 MHz FM in Paris), the flagship talk station specialising in music, news and entertainment; the very highbrow France Culture (93.5 MHz FM); France Musique (91.7 MHz FM), which broadcasts over 1000 classical-music and jazz concerts each year; Radio Bleu, a network of stations for over-50s listeners; and France Info, a 24-hour news station that broadcasts headlines in French every few minutes and can be heard at 105.5 MHz FM. FIP (105.1 MHz FM) has a wide range of music – from hip-hop and chanson to world and rock – while Le Mouv’ (92.1 MHz FM) is bubblegum pop.
Radio France Internationale (RFI; www.rfi.fr), France’s voice abroad since 1931 and independent of Radio France since 1986, broadcasts in 19 languages (including English) and can be reached in Paris at 738 kHz AM. Arte Radio is a Franco-German web radio station featuring news reports and music.
Among the private radio networks, RTL (104.3 MHz FM) is still the leading general-interest station with over eight million listeners and three stations: RTL 1, RTL 2 and Fun Radio. The droves of FM pop-music stations include Hot Mix Radio, Nostalgie and Chérie FM, most of which follow the phone-in format with wisecracking DJs. Hard-core clubbers turn the dial to Radio Nova at 101.5 MHz FM for the latest on the nightclub scene; Radio FG (98.2 MHz FM) is the station for House, techno, garage and trance; and Paris Jazz (88.2 MHz FM) offers jazz and blues.
By law, radio broadcasters in France have to play at least 40% of their music in French – a law passed to protect French pop from being swamped by English-language imports – and stations can be fined if they don’t comply. This helps explain why so many English-language hits are re-recorded in French – not always very successfully.
More than half of France’s seven major national terrestrial TV channels (www.francetelevisions.fr) are public: France 2 and France 3 are general-interest stations designed to complement each other: the former focuses on news, entertainment and education, while the latter broadcasts regional