RSF investigation: the confidentiality clauses silencing French journalists

The “confidentiality,” “loyalty,” and “non-disparagement” clauses included in French workers’ termination contracts are not new or specific to the world of journalism. According to Martin Benoist, an employment lawyer who has handled cases involving these clauses, “all settlement agreements” contain these types of terms and conditions. The problem is this: journalists are being forced to sign contracts that have vague, indefinite non-disparagement obligations towards their former employers, preventing them from publicly criticising and potentially investigating subjects linked to entire media conglomerates. This severely restricts reporters’ freedom of expression and professional activity. What’s more, France's private media sector is currently dominated by a handful of shareholders and at least one such corporation — the Bolloré group, owned by the eponymous billionaire Vincent Bolloré — has repeatedly demonstrated very concerning practices that are a clear subject of public interest, which journalists must be able to report on.  

These clauses are tangibly affecting French journalism. In February 2024, Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, a former investigative journalist for the television channel Canal+, a subsidiary of the Bolloré-controlled Vivendi group, was sentenced to a fine of 151,000 EUR (around 164,400 USD) for denouncing Bolloré’s tactics in one of our documentaries. That’s when RSF started investigating.   

In 2016, 148 journalists left the news channel I-Télé after a failed strike, signing severance agreements that included severe non-disclosure clauses. The years that followed were marked by a wave of departures at some of France’s most prominent media outlets — Canal+, the radio station Europe 1, the weekly Journal du Dimanche (JDD) and the magazine Paris Match — notably due to editorial interference and controversial appointments which caused unprecedented labour disputes in the journalism industry. All of these departures involved confidentiality clauses, and some of these outlets lost up to one hundred journalists each. RSF estimates that around 500 journalists in France have been bound by this type of clause over the past ten years based on the documents and testimonials the NGO has been able to access — the real number is likely much higher. 

It is difficult to measure exactly how many journalists have been affected by these agreements as the clauses forbid journalists from affirming they’ve signed such a contract. “These clauses are so vague that we don't even know how long we must stay silent. It creates a permanent state of hypervigilance,” says a former JDD journalist who requested anonymity. This reporter thinks twice before expressing themselves on social media or working on an article even remotely linked to their former employer, for fear of being sued and having to pay back their severance payments. 

“It's a scare tactic,” says another former employee of JDD, where a prolonged strike in the summer of 2023 resulted in the departure of almost the entire editorial team. Their termination agreements were accompanied by “confidentiality and loyalty obligations” to their former employer Lagardère News, and the time limit of these obligations is unclear. They recount an experience similar to that of the journalists who left i-Télé (now CNews) seven years earlier, as well as those who exited Europe 1, Paris Match and Canal+.

Emmanuel Vire, who has worked at the Prisma media group for over 20 years and is a delegate for the National Union of Journalists (SNJ), which is affiliated with the major French trade union the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), told RSF that although his employer has always imposed these clauses, he believes they have become “tougher.” In his words, “Previously, there was only a paragraph preventing employees from suing Prisma after they left. The problem was a classic labour law conflict between the employee and the company.” Prisma’s severance agreements always stipulated that the departing employee had an “obligation of professional loyalty and discretion” towards the media group, but since its takeover by the Bolloré-owned Vivendi group in 2021, a non-disparagement clause making it impossible to testify in court against Prisma or any other company in the Vivendi group — unless judicially obliged to do so — is included in contractual severance agreements. 

Alarmingly vague wording

For former employees of JDD and Paris Match — both owned by Lagardère News until LVMH acquired Paris Match in 2024 —  the clauses state that ex-employees must not undertake any “action” or “behaviour” or make any “negative comment” that would damage “the interests and/or reputation of Lagardère Media News.” The agreement goes as far as to extend this ban to “any other entity of the Lagardère Group, and/or its managers and/or employees.” There is no time limit to this ban, meaning that even ten years after leaving Paris Match, a former employee cannot talk about what happened behind the scenes. It is also unclear whether former employees are legally allowed to investigate stories about the famous cabaret Folies Bergères, for example, or the concert venue Casino de Paris, as they are also owned by Lagardère. 

Even Patrick Cohen, a renowned former journalist for the Lagardère-owned outlet Europe 1 who is not particularly concerned about the non-disclosure clause’s impact on his freedom of expression, wonders what his contract entails: “I didn't know whether it only concerned the current managers [of Lagardère News] or the next ones as well, the shareholders, etc.” Even if the takeover happened after they left, the vague wording of these clauses could mean that former employees of Lagardère outlets are banned from criticising Lagardère's current main shareholder Viviendi and its owner, Vincent Bolloré, who currently holds over fifteen media outlets in his grip.

Obstructing the right to inform the public

“If these journalists want to keep working in the same industry — do investigative reporting, speak on television, etc. — they now do so with a crutch,” warns Martin Benoist. “The loyalty obligation is problematic because the definition of 'loyalty' is very broad in the Bolloré universe,” explains another lawyer, who has represented some of these journalists and wishes to remain anonymous due to the confidential nature of these agreements — proving just how sensitive the subject is. 

Due to these intimidating conditions, many journalists are reluctant to share their experiences. “I've always been very careful about what I say,” said a former I-Télé journalist. “Bolloré's minions are extremely aggressive and on top of that, they have very substantial resources dedicated to legal action. They don't hesitate [to sue].” The case of Jean-Baptiste Rivoire is a prime example of this belligerent behaviour. In 2021, RSF released the documentary “The Système B,” in which Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, the former deputy editor of Canal+'s investigative journalism programme “Spécial Investigation,” described the pressure Canal+ put on its journalists. He asserts their reporting was “censored, damaged and eventually suppressed” after the channel was taken over by Vincent Bolloré, who the journalist describes in the documentary as someone who manages by terror. All of the facts Jean-Baptiste Rivoire mentioned in the documentary had already been made public by other journalists and outlets. 

According to the French labour court that handled Jean-Baptiste Rivoire’s trial, the journalist’s comments are “likely to tarnish [the] reputation [of Canal+ executives] and to damage their honour and esteem.” Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, on the other hand, argued his freedom of expression was “disproportionately infringed” by the non-disclosure clause in his severance agreement. RSF attempted to testify in the case as an expert witness specialising in press freedom, but the court ruled that the dispute was solely a matter of labour law.

At the time of this writing, Canal+ had not responded to RSF requests for comments on the case or its company policy regarding the clauses signed by former employees. Lagardère News and Vivendi also did not respond to RSF requests for comments.

Self-censor or leave with nothing

In court, employers sometimes argue that journalists are not obliged to sign such clauses. When Canal + chairman Maxime Saada was questioned about the channel’s policies by the French Parliament’s commission of inquiry into the allocation of digital terrestrial television (DTT) channels in February 2024, he insisted that when his employees left after a mass strike, their departure was voluntary and “under very satisfactory economic conditions,” citing Jean-Baptiste Rivoire’s case as an example. 

The journalists on the other end of these negotiations tell a very different story. Without a severance agreement, they face the prospect of leaving without any compensation or eligibility for unemployment benefits. “We find ourselves in a situation where we want to leave — not under just any conditions, of course — and we have to find a compromise while not being in a position of strength,” said a former journalist from I-Télé which belongs to Canal+. “We're left wondering what the other option is if we refuse to sign.” 

“I knew that there would be a clause in exchange for the severance package,” added a former Paris Match journalist who found themselves in a similar situation, ”but I didn't have the energy to go to the labour court.” Journalists negotiating their departures after labour disputes are forced to accept the conditions in their termination agreement or leave with nothing, and the money included in the severance package is vital for journalists to stay afloat in an unstable market. Statistics on JDD’s labour issues illustrate this precarity: out of the 83 former journalists on strike, half of whom were on permanent contracts, only 18 were able to secure a permanent contract a year after their departure. 

There is one case in which journalists can walk away from these negotiations unscathed. When an outlet has a change in ownership journalists can leave through an “ownership change clause,” included in their union contract which allows them to receive compensation for their departure without signing any additional agreements. Around sixty employees of the media group RMC BFM, which has been experiencing an exodus of workers following its takeover by the CMA-CGM group in October 2024, have exercised this right. 

Parliamentary inquiries hampered

When it comes to the journalists unable to resort to the ownership change clause, very few have refused to yield to the pressure to sign muzzling severance agreements. After 20 years at Paris Match, Caroline Fontaine, a journalist and elected member of the Société de Journalistes (SDJ), a journalist-led organisation within an outlet that protects its editorial independence, legally challenged her layoff in a labour court without any prior attempts to negotiate with her employer as an agreement would have included problematic clauses. “It's completely contradictory,” she says. “If our job is to gather testimonies and inform [the public], how can we be prevented from speaking out about serious matters?”

Even though she chose to retain her freedom of speech, Caroline Fontaine is still affected by these clauses because her former colleagues signed severance contracts obliging them to “refrain from intervening directly or indirectly in any proceedings involving one of the group's companies.” As a result, they cannot testify in court to support Caroline Fontaine’s arguments. “I'm free to say what I want, but if no one testifies to this, it's word against word,” she laments. 

This imposed self-censorship has even hampered parliamentary inquiry commissions. During a 2022 Senate hearing on media concentration, former Europe 1 journalist Olivier Samain recalled being “on a narrow ridge, bound on one side by the need to answer [questions] and on the other by this loyalty clause.” In an interview with the news website Arrêt sur images in September 2023, David Assouline, a Socialist senator and rapporteur of the inquiry commission, recounted how journalists had contacted him anonymously to recount their experiences for fear of reprisals. 

RSF experienced the same obstacle in 2023 when it tried to collect witness statements for the European Commission’s investigation into Vivendi's anticipated takeover of Lagardère but many journalists from the outlets owned by the two groups were afraid to speak to RSF or be heard by the Commission due to the confidentiality clauses they had signed. When RSF published a joint op-ed in the newspaper Libération on 11 July 2024 condemning Europe 1’s transformation into an opinion machine, which was co-signed by affected journalists, 37 of the 63 signatories were forced to remain anonymous because they were gagged by the non-disparagement clause that Europe 1 required them to sign as part of the exit plans implemented in 2021.

“How is it possible that hundreds and hundreds of journalists are made to sign such clauses in France today?” demanded Jean-Baptiste Rivoire in March 2024 during his hearing before the parliamentary commission on Canal +’s DTT allocation. Vincent Bolloré has imposed his rejection of basic journalistic ethics and brutal approach to consolidating control of the market on a significant share of France’s media landscape; it is dangerous that journalists who have witnessed these tactics first-hand are unable to testify or speak out. “By buying journalists’ silence, they prevent the public from being informed of what's going on,” said Jean-Baptiste Rivoire, stressing that “it is impossible to support these clauses in a democracy.” His appeal, which is currently pending, will be a crucial moment in the fight to defend journalists’ right to keep citizens informed — and could curb a dangerous legal precedent that places corporate rights above freedom of expression and the public’s right to information. 

By Haïfa Mzalouat

If you have any information related to this issue that you would like to share with RSF, please contact us at hmzalouat[at]rsfsecure.org