24 heures sur la Deux

In 1969 Jacques Chaban-Delmas's government abolished the Ministry of Information and tried something unprecedented: two autonomous, competing newsrooms inside the ORTF, the French public broadcaster. On the first channel, Pierre Desgraupes. On the second, Jacqueline Baudrier, who had been running the news at France Inter and brought a core of radio journalists with her. I was one of them.

I had spent eight years with Agence France-Presse, in Africa, Vietnam and Biafra, before joining France Inter. Now I was in front of a camera. "24 heures sur la Deux" was born in the autumn of 1969 with Léon Zitrone and Michel Péricard as its star names, and a generation of newcomers: Jean-François Robinet, Bernard Volker, Jacques Alexandre and me. The second channel was then the only one broadcasting in colour. So was our news.

Anchor and reporter

The format was new: a set with a screen behind the presenter, and big stories unfolded over several evenings. And nobody stayed in their chair. Between stints at the desk I made reports and interviews: the revelations about the My Lai massacre as early as November 1969, Biafra in the aftermath of the war, the arrival in Paris of Mikis Theodorakis, fresh from the Greek colonels' jails, the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Nicolae Ceausescu, President Senghor in Dakar, Parisians in the street on the death of General de Gaulle. And in 1971, a two-part investigation into Italian neo-fascism.

In September 1972 the whole team changed channels. Another story began, on Channel One.