Sarkozy Wants to Create a French Bbc

French president Nicolas Sarkozy has indicated that he wants to reshape France's public service broadcaster - and sees the BBC as a model to emulate.

In his first formal grilling by journalists since taking office last year yesterday, Sarkozy hinted at reforming French state television more along the lines of the BBC, and making it advert-free.

Sarkozy also dropped a bombshell on the French media, announcing out of the blue he was culling the English-language service of France 24 - the country's answer to BBC World, CNN, Fox and Sky.

France 24, which has been on the air for less than 18 months, was the brainchild of Sarkozy's predecessor, Jaques Chirac, who wanted to counterbalance the dominant "Anglo-Saxon" world view in rolling TV news provided by UK and US services.

"I want the remit of public television to be reviewed in depth, and for us to consider a complete end to advertising on public channels," Sarkozy said.With French state TV currently funded through a mixture of direct government grant and advertising revenue, his remarks sent shares in private French TV networks soaring. Ad breaks are much more heavily delineated from programming than on UK commercial channels, with inserts alerting viewers before and after that adverts are being transmitted.

Sarkozy also told journalists he wanted to close France 24 in its current multilingual form and create a new service, France Monde.

Launched in December 2006, France 24 broadcasts in French, English and Arabic. A Spanish service had been on the cards for later this year - but that now also appears doomed.

"With taxpayers' money, I am not prepared to broadcast a channel that does not speak French," Sarkozy told assembled journalists, including reporters from the channel - at a two hour press conference.

Sarkozy said a new channel, France Monde, would be formed "as fast as possible, at any rate this year", which would amalgamate the resources of the existing networks Radio France Internationale, TV5 television, and France 24.

He said details of the new organisation "remained open to debate" but that "a public channel, France Monde ... can only speak French".

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

Sarkozy suggested simultaneous live subtitling in English, Spanish and Arabic for the new rolling news service - but did not specify how exactly such live subtitling might work.