French to set up version of BBC

A report in this morning's FT suggests that Nicholas Sarkozy wants to set up the equivilent of the BBC in France.

French television operators would be taxed to fund a public broadcaster similar to Britain’s BBC under a radical broadcasting shake-up that President Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday described as a “policy of civilisation”.
As part of the shake-up, advertising on France’s two public television stations would be scrapped and replaced by revenue from new taxes on mobile phone operators, internet service providers, plus a levy on the advertising revenues of private television channels.

says the paper

The move may also see the end of the France 24 experiment as the station will be merged with Tv5 Monde.It seems that the experiment of distributing French news around the world has thus failed.

According to Forbes,Sarkozy said

'Between Al-Jazeera, the Arab perspective, and CNN, the Anglo-Saxon perspective, we would like to carry more of a French perspective