Euronews

• 1. Introduction

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  Euronews went on air on the 1st of January 1993, broadcasting its first bulletin from the Lyon suburb of Écully. Behind that modest debut was a bigger ambition: to give Europe its own answer to the round-the-clock news culture that CNN had made dominant during the Persian Gulf War two years before. Ten national public broadcasters from across the continent had pooled resources to make it happen. The questions the channel's story raises are worth sitting with. Could a broadcaster owned by so many governments, speaking so many languages, ever hold a clear editorial line? And what happens when the investors who fund it start to want something in return?

• 2. A Consortium of Ten

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  The idea behind Euronews was directly triggered by CNN's performance during the Persian Gulf War of 1991. The European Broadcasting Union watched that conflict unfold through an American lens and decided Europe needed its own 24-hour perspective. The founding consortium it assembled, formally named SOCEMIE, brought together ten national public broadcasters: Cyprus's CyBC, Egypt's ERTU, France Télévisions, Italy's RAI, Belgium's RTBF, Portugal's RTP, Spain's RTVE, Monaco's TMC, Finland's Yle, and a part-time Arabic service backed by a two-year European Commission grant. Switzerland's SRG SSR joined shortly after as a non-founding member. Notably absent were some of Europe's biggest public broadcasters. The BBC and Germany's ARD and ZDF all declined to participate. Lyon was chosen over Munich, Bologna, and Valencia as the network's home city. At launch, different languages were delivered not through separate channels but through a sound multiplex system, meaning viewers tuned to one picture stream and selected their preferred language audio.

• 3. Expansion and Early Ownership Shifts

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  In late 1997, British broadcaster ITN paid £5.1 million for a 49% stake in Euronews, and immediately began supplying content to the channel. The same year, a part-time Arabic service launched in April 1997 with a grant from the European Commission, staffed by eight journalists and freelancers. That service ceased on the 15th of April 1999 when the grant expired. ITN's involvement ended in April 2003 when the company sold its stake to refocus on news-gathering rather than channel management. By then, the network had quietly been diversifying its ownership. In 2001, Russia's state broadcaster VGTRK acquired a 1.8% stake in SOCEMIE and a Russian-language service followed that same year. On the 6th of February 2006, Ukrainian public broadcaster Natsionalna Telekompanya Ukraïny purchased a one percent interest. And in February 2009, Turkish public broadcaster TRT bought 15.70% of the channel's shares, becoming the fourth-largest partner behind France Télévisions at 23.93%, RAI at 21.54%, and VGTRK at 16.94%. Language services grew accordingly: Turkish launched in January 2010, Persian in October 2010, and Ukrainian in August 2011.

• 4. The NBC Chapter

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  In November 2016, talks began with NBCUniversal over what would become the most consequential ownership restructuring in Euronews's history. The European Commission scrutinized the deal over fears of what it called an "Americanization" of the network. Those concerns were resolved through structural assurances: when NBCUniversal's News Group finalized a 25% stake in February 2017 for €25 million (around $30 million), the editorial board was configured so that SOCEMIE member broadcasters held seven seats against the Egyptian investor Naguib Sawiris's three and NBC News's single seat. NBC News president Deborah Turness was appointed to lead international operations; Euronews CEO Michael Peters, who had run the network since 2004, stayed on to head the combined entity. On the 9th of May 2017, Euronews began splitting into twelve language-specific editions, each with its own on-screen text, ticker, and lower thirds. That process finished on the 24th of May. The new arrangement also enabled Euronews reporter Annelise Borges to become the only TV journalist worldwide to broadcast live from the MV Aquarius for ten days as the Italian government refused the rescue ship access to Italian ports. The NBC partnership unraveled quickly. By 2019, the network was facing a liquidity crisis; by April 2020, NBCUniversal had sold its 25% stake back to Media Globe Networks for €3 million. The channel's estimated value had fallen to €3.7 million from a reported €67 million in 2015, according to the French magazine Capital.

• 5. Ownership, Independence, and Editorial Pressure

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  From the moment Egyptian telecom magnate Naguib Sawiris won approval to take a 53% controlling stake in February 2015, questions about editorial independence became a recurring feature of Euronews's story. The same year, Inter Media Group, owned by pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash, purchased the Ukrainian service. Ukraine's government revoked Euronews's Ukrainian broadcasting licence in response. When Firtash abandoned the project, seventeen journalists were left redundant. The Russian service, financed by the Russian government, refused to offer any of them jobs, a decision that management attributed specifically to VGTRK's instructions, which also violated French labour legislation. Scrutiny came from multiple directions. A French newspaper investigation in November 2020 found that Euronews had been producing magazine segments about Dubai sponsored by the Dubai tourism board, with sponsorship disclosed only in small-print text rather than with the institutional logo used for other sponsored content. The outlet noted that International Media Investments, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi's ruling family, had quietly become a shareholder in 2017 and signed a memorandum with Euronews the following year. The network later conducted similar arrangements with Media City Qatar and the Saudi Tourism Authority. When Lisbon-based Alpac Capital acquired an 88% controlling stake in July 2022, completing a deal first reported in December 2021, the purchase drew scrutiny because Alpac was allegedly linked to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán through Mário David, the father of Alpac Capital CEO Pedro Vargas David. Funds from the Hungarian state partly financed the acquisition, which Hungary said was intended to counter a perceived media "left-wing bias". Ágnes Urbán, director of the think tank Mertek Media Monitor, warned that Euronews risked becoming a "pseudo-independent" media outpost of the Hungarian government. As of July 2023, Alpac Capital's share in Euronews SA stood at 97.6%.

• 6. Geopolitical Flashpoints

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  Belarus banned Euronews in April 2021, with authorities replacing the channel's frequencies with those of Channel One Russia's Pobeda channel. The official reason given was that Euronews had run advertisements in English rather than Russian or Belarusian. Euronews said publicly that it had not been notified of the decision and learned of it through press reports, adding that it "deeply regreted" the move. A Minsk expert noted the ban left Belarusians without an alternative to state-controlled outlets. In Russia, tensions had been building since at least May 2016, when foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova accused Euronews of "disinformation" after the channel mistakenly embedded a tweet from a parody account impersonating foreign minister Sergey Lavrov. Access to Euronews in Russia was eventually restricted by the media regulator Roskomnadzor in late March 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The channel's broadcast signal was taken over by Russia-24, and its original frequencies were reassigned on the 7th of April to a channel operated by state TV journalist Vladimir Solovyov, who had been sanctioned by the European Union for his support of the invasion. From Ukraine's side, criticism ran in a different direction. In August 2014, a senior Ukrainian broadcasting official described the Russian-language service of Euronews as having "a propagandistic nature" due to the Russian journalists staffing it. In June 2022, Ukraine's broadcasting council formally accused Euronews of promoting a pro-Kremlin narrative. CEO Guillaume Dubois replied that it was "unfair that one aspect would be extracted out of the overall rolling coverage" and expressed his "full solidarity" with Ukraine.

• 7. Restructuring and the Brussels Move

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  On the 2nd of March 2023, Euronews announced it would relocate its principal and editorial headquarters from Lyon to Brussels. The plan called for the creation of one hundred new positions in Brussels, including seventy reserved for journalists, while eliminating 198 staff positions in Lyon. A total of 142 jobs would remain in Lyon, among them the Russian and Persian-language editorial teams. The previous Lyon headquarters complex, which Euronews had moved into in October 2015 after having it designed by the Paris-based architecture firm Jakob and MacFarlane, covering 10,000 square metres, was to be closed and sold. The French National Syndicate of Journalists criticized the move, predicting that Euronews would become a "half empty shell" and a weakening of what it called the "pluralism of information". Personnel changes accompanied the restructuring. Guillaume Dubois, who had joined as CEO in June 2022 ahead of the Alpac Capital purchase, was fired in October 2024 and replaced by Claus Strunz, a former Managing Director at Axel Springer. Strunz's appointment drew concern from employees who pointed to his pro-Israel and anti-immigrant statements on Twitter. The channel also relaunched its Polish-language service on the 15th of January 2025, the second time it had done so; the first short-lived Polish service had run in 2011-2013, timed to Poland's assumption of the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, and the new launch was timed to exactly the same occasion.