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In France at the dawn of 2025, nine billionaires control 90% of private national media. This hyper-concentration of ownership is not incidental. It is a structural condition, one that subordinates information to private interest.
Among those nine, one figure stands apart for his reach into the south of France: Rodolphe Saadé, CEO of CMA CGM, the Franco-Lebanese shipping giant founded in Marseille in 1978 and now the third largest container transport company in the world. Since 2022, Saadé has moved systematically into media. La Provence for 81 million euros. A stake in M6. La Tribune. Then Altice Média, bringing BFMTV and RMC into the fold. |
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By 2025, he had added Brut, Chérie FM, and Corse-Matin. Each acquisition was framed publicly as a philanthropic act, a rescue operation for a struggling press. Before the National Assembly's economic affairs committee, Saadé positioned himself as a defender of pluralism and journalistic independence. The recorded evidence told a different story.
To make this visible, the students built a physical model: a suspended hand, painted in Bauhaus primary colours, its fingers trailing red threads down to miniature institutions built from coffee cups and cardboard, representing CMA CGM, the Marseille city hall, and the Élysée. The red threads connected everything. The hand held it all. The theory anchoring the work came from Harold Lasswell: media ownership is not merely an economic question but a mechanism for producing public opinion. When a single actor controls the information environment, the information ceases to be neutral. The students named what they saw plainly. Propaganda. |
Visitors at the exposition responded to both registers of the work: the practical and the political. Some asked how the hand was constructed, which glue was used, how the institutions were made. Others asked who the hand belonged to, what CMA CGM was, and why any of this constituted propaganda. That the two lines of questioning ran in parallel was itself part of the point. The object was legible as craft before it was legible as critique, and the critique only landed once visitors had already been drawn in.
