The journalist and presenter of BFM TV, Rachid M’Barki, has been fired by the French news channel for allegedly serving the propaganda of the Makhzen, according to its director general Marc-Olivier Fogiel, who announced the news on Thursday. The news channel also filed a complaint against X for ‘passive corruption and breach of trust’.
M’Barki, a French-Moroccan presenter aged 54, was suspended on 11 January by the director of the French channel following an alert given by a Radio France journalist who was working on the large-scale investigation “Story Killers” coordinated by the Forbidden Stories consortium. M’Barki was accused of broadcasting biased, oriented, and unvalidated information.
The investigation revealed that BFM TV had broadcast information provided by a disinformation agency run by a Zionist office, which allegedly sells its services worldwide. Investigative journalists were able to meet with a manager of this organisation, known as “Team Jorge”. The mastermind of these operations is described as Tal Hanan, who is the head of two companies operating in security and intelligence: Sol Energy and Denoman. He is described as an explosives specialist who served in the Special Forces and as a former liaison officer for the Zionist army with the command of the US Sixth Fleet Special Forces.
Regarding M’Barki on BFM TV, one of the objectives of the short reports broadcast on the air was to serve the propaganda of the Makhzen. BFM TV management conducted an internal investigation and questioned M’Barki, who admitted to operations of infiltration and a ‘journalistic error of judgment’ in doing a favor for a friend. The investigation targeted ‘information broadcast in the night journal between midnight and 4:30 am, which would have been aired without being validated by the usual channel, i.e., the editor-in-chief,’ according to concordant sources. The investigation aimed to determine if the content was influenced and if the images aired on the channel came from external sources.
The media criticized M’Barki for broadcasting a story about a June 2022 economic forum between Morocco and Spain, in which he supported the Makhzen’s position on Western Sahara. In a widely shared video on social networks, M’Barki mentions the holding of the forum in the occupied city of Dakhla, which he presented as part of Moroccan territory. According to BFM TV’s CEO, the presenter ‘managed to request (these) images at the last minute’ to illustrate news briefs, ‘once the editor-in-chief was occupied with another story and had validated the rest of the story.
