No Strings Attached? Les Guignols de l'info and French Television

Abstract

This article discusses the French puppet news program Les Guignols de l'info, one of the oldest and most significant satirical television news shows in the world. It combines historical, semiotic, and political economy approaches in assessing the show's contribution to the scholarly debate on news parody. Les Guignols is explained in terms of the transformation of the French network television system and the creation of Canal+. It represented a new mix of genres and assisted network Canal+ to counterprogram successfully and build a brand identity. This, in turn, shaped the political economic framework, legitimatizing commercial television as being in both the national and the public interest. The article considers questions of the relationship among genre, truth, and branding from a political economic perspective.

Notes

¹Counterprogramming is the strategic use of programming scheduling to maximize target audience and sometimes to decrease the size of the competing network's audience.