The 24-hour news channel, i24News, launched in 2013 in Tel Aviv by Patrick Drahi, owner of SFR in France, plans to move to Morocco, after Dubai recently.
Based in Tel Aviv, i24News has 150 journalists who run three English, French and Arabic newsrooms. “A single newsroom, a single editorial conference and, in the field, a single technical team per subject with a journalist for each of the three editorial staff; This is the avant-garde side, “Frank Melloul, director of the channel, told Les Echos newspaper, adding that” from the start, i24 has been a medium of coexistence. Patrick Drahi wanted to create France 24 of the Middle East ”,
The chain, followed by more than a billion households in the world, has offices in Paris, New York, Washington, Los Angeles and, recently in Dubai, fruit of the diplomatic rapprochement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates consecrated by the signature in September of the Abrahamic accords in Washington.
I24News executives are continuing negotiations with Bahrain and Morocco, two other signatories to the Abrahamic Accords, to open offices there as well. “Most of these partnerships were signed just ten days after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas last May,” said Frank Melloul, adding that “a media is an observer of reality. This is what we are, but in fact we have also become actors in the construction of a new Middle East “.
“I24News is a complex medium, which makes a permanent compromise between journalistic professionalism and public relations aimed at redressing the image of Israel”, observes Jérôme Bourdon, professor in the Communication department of Tel Aviv University, noting that ” i24NEWS participates in the emergence of a soft power, media diplomacy. […] Here, the specificity is that the founder is not a state, but a wealthy Franco-Israeli businessman (of Moroccan origin), Patrick Drahi, who has chosen to commit to Israel “.
